Cultural Studies Journal, Volume 06-03 (1990-12)

CULTURAL STUDIES Volume 6 Number 3 October 1992 Issue Editors:

JOHN HARTLEY IEN ANG

EDITORIAL STATEMENT

Cultural Studies seeks to foster more open analytic, critical and political conversations by encouraging people to push the dialogue into fresh, uncharted territory. It is devoted to understanding the specific ways cultural practices operate in everyday and social formations. But it is also devoted to intervening in the processes by which the existing techniques, institutions and structures of power are reproduced, resisted and transformed. Although focused in some sense on culture, we understand the term inclusively rather than exclusively. We are interested in work that explores the relations between cultural practices and everyday life, economic relations, the material world, the State, and historical forces and contexts. The journal is not committed to any single theoretical or political position; rather, we assume that questions of power organized around differences of race, class, gender, sexuality, age, ethnicity, nationality, colonial relations, etc., are all necessary to an adequate analysis of the contemporary world. We assume as well that different questions, different contexts and different institutional positions may bring with them a wide range of critical practices and theoretical frameworks. ‘Cultural studies’ as a fluid set of critical practices has moved rapidly into the mainstream of contemporary intellectual and academic life in a variety of political, national and intellectual contexts. Those of us working in cultural studies find ourselves caught between the need to define and defend its specificity and the desire to resist closure of the ongoing history of cultural studies by any such act of definition. We would like to suggest that cultural studies is most vital politically and intellectually when it refuses to construct itself as a fixed or unified theoretical position that can move freely across historical and political contexts. Cultural studies is in fact constantly reconstructing itself in the light of changing historical projects and intellectual resources. It is propelled less by a theoretical agenda than by its desire to construct possibilities, both immediate and imaginary, out of historical circumstances; it seeks to give a better understanding of where we are so that we can create new historical contexts and formations which are based on more just principles of freedom, equality, and the distribution of wealth and power. But it is, at the same time, committed to the importance of the ‘detour through theory’ as the crucial moment of critical intellectual work.

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Moreover, cultural studies is always interdisciplinary; it does not seek to explain everything from a cultural point of view or to reduce reality to culture. Rather it attempts to explore the specific effects of cultural practices using whatever resources are intellectually and politically available and/or necessary. This is, of course, always partly determined by the form and place of its institutionalization. To this end, cultural studies is committed to the radically contextual, historically specific character not only of cultural practices but also of the production of knowledge within cultural studies itself. It assumes that history, including the history of critical thought, is never guaranteed in advance, that the relations and possibilities of social life and power are never necessarily stitched into place, once and for all. Recognizing that ‘people make history in conditions not of their own making’, it seeks to identify and examine those moments when people are manipulated and deceived as well as those moments when they are active, struggling and even resisting. In that sense cultural studies is committed to the popular as a cultural terrain and a political force. Cultural Studies will publish essays covering a wide range of topics and styles. We hope to encourage significant intellectual and political experimentation, intervention and dialogue. At least half the issues will focus on special topics, often not traditionally associated with cultural studies. Occasionally, we will make space to present a body of work representing a specific national, ethnic or social tradition. Whenever possible, we intend to represent the truly international nature of contemporary work, without ignoring the significant dif ferences that are the result of speaking from and to specific contexts. We invite articles, reviews, critiques, photographs and other forms of ‘artistic’ production, and suggestions for special issues. And we invite readers to comment on the strengths and weaknesses, not only of the project and progress of cultural studies, but of the project and progress of Cultural Studies as well. Larry Grossberg Janice Radway *** Contributions should be sent to Professor Lawrence Grossberg, Dept. of Speech Communication, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 244 Lincoln Hall, 702 S.Wright St., Urbana, Ill. 61801, USA. They should be in duplicate and should conform to the reference system set out in the Notes for Contributors, available from the Editors or Publishers. Reviews, and books for review, should be sent to Tim O’Sullivan, School of Arts, Leicester Polytechnic, P.O. Box 143, Leicester LE1 9EH; or to John Frow, Dept. of English, University of Queensland, St. Lucia, Queensland 4072, Australia; or to Jennifer Daryl Slack, Dept. of Humanities, Michigan Technological University, Houghton, MI 49931, USA.

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Frontispiece Ernie Bridge—‘The Great Australian Dream’ country music album/ cassette (see Preface). Available from the Hon. Ernie Bridge, 199 Flamborough Street, Doubleview, Western Australia 6018 (Aus $15 plus $3 postage).

CONTENTS

Preface: ‘Dismantling’ Fremantle? John Hartley

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Dismantling ‘cultural studies’ Ien Ang

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ARTICLES Visions of disorder: Aboriginal people and youth crime reporting Steve Mickler

308

Provincializing Europe: postcoloniality and the critique of history Dipesh Chakrabarty

324

Identity without a centre: allegory, history and Irish nationalism Luke Gibbons

346

Hegemonic irrationalities and psychoanalytic cultural critique Zoë Sofia

365

Useful culture Tony Bennett

385

(Mis)taking policy: notes on the cultural policy debate Tom O’Regan

400

Of rocks and hard places: the colonized, the national and Australian cultural studies Graeme Turner

415

Speaking trajectories: Meaghan Morris, antipodean theory and Australian cultural studies McKenzie Wark

425

Expatriation: useful astonishment as cultural studies John Hartley

442

KITES Afterthoughts on ‘Australianism’

464

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Meaghan Morris Voices from the outside: towards a new internationalist localism Kuan-Hsing Chen

473

REVIEWS Radical poetics Barrett Watten

484

The new look Pat Kirkham

492

The processed world Alec McHoul

497

Look Mum no hands Graeme Turner

501

Exploring the symbolic economy Martyn Lee

505

Notes on contributors

511

Index—Volume 6

524

JOHN HARTLEY

PREFACE: ‘DISMANTLING’ FREMANTLE?

This issue of Cultural Studies, edited by Ien Ang and John Hartley, is devoted to papers which arise from an international cultural studies conference held in June 1991 and called, oddly, ‘Dismantle Fremantle’. ‘Dismantle Fremantle’ had no deconstructive designs upon the fabric of the Western Australian port city; on the contrary, Fremantle provided an ideal venue for conference participants, as they thought about what ‘dismantling’ cultural studies might mean. This was odd too, since many of the participants were noted figures in the field of cultural studies itself—after all, one of the general editors, several of the founding editors, and an entire busload of the editorial committee of this very journal were in attendance. Dismantling that lot might prove difficult, involving more than a touch of Daliesque autocannibalism, if such participants really planned to dismantle the intellectual enterprise they had themselves helped to constitute. Why would anyone want to dismantle cultural studies anyway? It’s hardly a lethal profession, given that most of those who profess it are marginal intellectuals in marginal institutions, hedged about on all sides by forces more powerful than they; on one side by the overgrown thickets of traditional academic disciplines, on another by an indifferent wall of incomprehension known as popular culture, and over there the philistine hordes of economic rationalists and political reactionaries. In such a landscape cultural studies is an upstart intellectual enterprise, about as threatening as the militarism of a toy soldier. But there are those for whom cultural studies is not hedged but hegemonic. And Fremantle was an ideal venue to see what they meant. It is a port whose only international claim to fame during the year of 1991 was that it was used as an entrepôt f or an especially notorious case of arms smuggling, presumably on the basis that no one would notice, which they didn’t at the time. In such a town, the goings on of Anglo-American cultural studies may have about as much local significance as the passage of a foreign ship bearing dangerous cargoes. More seriously, a particular brand of Anglo-American cultural studies has recently undergone a period of rapid capitalization in institutional, intellectual and publishing sectors, with major increases in productivity and a tendency to corner the market world-wide. As a port, Fremantle is clearly dedicated to two-way traffic; local commodities

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from sheep to cultural studies, can be exported to the world, while valuable imports, from Toyotas to television, make their welcome antipodean landfall. So from here, questions of the terms of trade of the international intellectual economy take on a material force. Inequalities of international exchange, neglect of local differences in favour of standardization, and the question of whether Anglo-American dominance of the market is desirable or disastrous; such matters are hard to avoid in Fremantle. Do they apply to cultural studies as well as to container ships? An ambiguous place, then, whose identity is far from settled, whose powers are not fully developed nor fully tested, and whose purposes are not unequivocally justifiable. Here, in the huge jarrah-wood ‘A’ Shed on the quayside of Fremantle’s Victoria Harbour, in Fremantle’s historic Town Hall, and in the former Boys’ School, now Film and Television Institute of WA, ‘Dismantle Fremantle’ unfolded. Its ceremonial highlight was the visit of a cabinet minister of the Western Australian state government; but, in true ‘Dismantle Fremantle’ style, the Honourable Ernie Bridge, Minister of Agriculture, Water Resources and The North West, who is also the first Aboriginal cabinet minister in Australian history, a substantial property owner in the cattle-station country of the state’s far north, and a well-known proponent of a utopian water-irrigation scheme, did not address us in any of these capacities. Along with his two sons Kim and Noel, he appeared in his equally famous capacity as a country-and-western singer, regaling us with his ‘Great Australian Dream’, which is a song, a reference to the destiny of his continental nation, and to the said water-irrigation scheme, all in one, harmonized on a guitar made in Fremantle of indigenous jarrah wood. That was our ceremonial highlight, along with the appearance of Perth’s best didgeridoo player, Richard Walley, and his troupe of traditional Aboriginal dancers, and the award-winning Aboriginal prison-poet Graeme Dixon, whose book Holocaust Island provided exactly the right accompaniment to the ceremonial Dismantle Dinner. Well, those were our applied cultural studies, our dismantling performances; cheering and perplexing our interstate and overseas visitors in about equal measure while the conference organizers spent the evening at the door arguing with two officers from the Liquor and Gaming Branch who were minded to take a dim view of the fact that we had sought to complete our participants’ cultural education with the study of some indigenous wines, presented by the Wine Education Council of Western Australia. As the WA cabinet minister sang the praises of the state whose viticulture was being promoted to its distinguished guests, the forces of Law were proving to be as relentless, insensitive, and bloody-minded as several of the papers presented at the conference had already revealed them to be. Meanwhile, as the Law looked for grounds for prosecution, the conference organizers looked on helplessly, only to see, over the burly shoulders of the Repressive State Apparatuses, a departing concessionary conferee put a sizeable dent in the organizer’s prized Chevy,

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the very vehicle in which, en route from Perth airport eighteen months earlier, the idea for ‘Dismantle Fremantle’ was first hatched. It was a perfect setting. Amid these experiential excesses, there were intellectual highlights too. Some of them are presented in the pages that follow. Some of them, alas, are not. But, for the record, here is the full list of papers. Ang, Ien (Amsterdam University and Murdoch University, Western Australia): ‘Hegemony in trouble: hazards of a postcolonialist Europe’. Bennett, Tony (Griffith University, Australia): ‘Useful culture’. Chakrabarty, Dipesh (Melbourne University and Australian National University) ‘Provincializing Europe: postcoloniality and the artifice of history’. Chambers, Deborah (University of Western Sydney, Australia) ‘Public and private images of women and suburban culture’. Chen, Kuan-Hsing (National Tsing Hua University, Taiwan) ‘Beyond the “audience”: the masses, the schizos, and/or the historical subject’. Chua Keng, Siew (Edith Cowan University, Australia) ‘Australian screen: ethnocentricity, (multi)cultural studies and Asian (re)presentation’. Craik, Jennifer (Griffith University) ‘Accounting for fashion: cultural studies and the ephemera’. Fry, Tony (Power Institute of Fine Arts, Sydney University) ‘Being by design: here and there’. Gibbons, Luke (City University, Dublin) ‘Identity without a centre: nationalism in a postcolonial frame’. Grossberg, Lawrence (University of Illinois at Urbana—Champaign, USA) ‘Cultural studies: diaspora or bullish market?’. Hartley, John (Murdoch University) ‘Expatriation: the country and the critic’. Hodge, Bob (Murdoch University) ‘Opening statement’. Jayamanne, Laleen (Power Institute of Fine Arts, Sydney University) ‘Love me tender, love me true, never let me go: a Sri Lankan reading of Tracey Moffatt’s Night Cries’. Lucy, Niall (Murdoch University) ‘Post/popular/culture’. Mercer, Colin (Griffith University) ‘“Little supplements of life”: cultural policy and the management of urban populations’. Mickler, Steve (Murdoch University and Aboriginal and Torres Straits Islander Commission) ‘Visions of disorder: Aboriginal people and the media’. Mishra, Vijay (Murdoch University) ‘Masculinity, stars, and narrative in Indian cinema’. Morris, Meaghan (independent, Bundeena) ‘Reflecting on mateship’. O’Regan, Tom (Murdoch University) ‘Two or three things I know about meaning…’. Petkovic, Josko (Murdoch University) ‘Dismantling the word’. Ruthrof, Horst (Murdoch University) ‘Closing statement’. Sofoulis, Zoë (Murdoch University) ‘The return of the expressed: ethnocentrism in psychoanalytic cultural critique’. Stratton, Jon (Curtin University, Australia) ‘Landscapes’. Turner, Graeme (Queensland University) ‘Of rocks and hard places: the colonized, the national and Australian cultural studies’.

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Wark, McKenzie (Macquarie University, Australia) ‘Perverse readings of the new world order: Meaghan Morris, cultural studies and antipodean theory’. Webb, Hugh (Murdoch University) ‘Jock Shandley’s hat: continental cultural provocations’.

‘Dismantle Fremantle’ performances: Country music: The Hon. Ernie Bridge, Noel Bridge and Kim Bridge. Didgeridoo: Richard Walley. Dance: Middar Nyoongar Dance group. Poetry: Graeme Dixon. Film/Video: Tracey Moffatt and Laleen Jayamanne. ‘Dismantle Fremantle’ was sponsored by the Communication Studies Program, the Asia Research Centre and the Centre for Research in Culture and Communication at Murdoch University, and by the Film and Television Institute of Western Australia, and supported by Desert Designs, Encore Productions, the ‘A’ Shed, Fremantle City Council. It was organized by Ien Ang, John Hartley, Niall Lucy and Zoë Sofoulis. PS. For those of you who like narrative closure: prosecution was averted, order was restored, and so was the Chevy. As for cultural studies, the jury is still out—or so it seems from the dozen or so ‘good and true’ whose thoughts on the subject follow.

IEN ANG

DISMANTLING ‘CULTURAL STUDIES’? (by way of introduction)

On St Patrick’s Day, 17 March 1992, Australian Prime Minister Paul Keating —who has been keen on accenting his Irish family origins—once again expressed his dismay at what he sees as Australia’s failure to assert its national identity. In his view, Australia could learn something from Ireland: ‘We have got to be in this country like the Irish are, proud without being silly, parochial without being unworldly, culturally secure without being culturally arrogant’.1 Of course, Keating’s comparison isn’t exactly a happy one. Australia’s Irish connection is not an innocent one, certainly not in current debates about ‘multicultural’ Australia. Furthermore, although both Ireland and Australia have been British colonies, Irish history is totally different from Australia’s, the latter being an immigrant society where what is left of the indigenous population has been scandalously relegated to a position of utter marginalization and deprivation, whereas the indigenous is precisely the (symbolic) reservoir of much of contemporary Irish identity. In other words, what is a source of self-esteem in Ireland, is a source of shame in (mainstream) Australia. This serves only to point to one way that the historical construction of ‘Australian identity’ is fraught with political, cultural and moral difficulties rather different from that of ‘Irish identity’. Still, Keating’s remark is quite incisive in pointing to one problem that both nations have in common: the need to establish, maintain and assert themselves as relatively peripheral entities in an international order where the centres of power and authority lie elsewhere. Keating’s formula for Australia as a nation—the carving out of a space for pride, parochialism and cultural security while avoiding silliness, unworldliness and arrogance—reverberates quite prominently in Australian cultural studies, as will be apparent from many of the articles in this issue of Cultural Studies. Compiled here is a selection of (partly revised or entirely rewritten) papers delivered at ‘Dismantle Fremantle’, an international cultural studies ‘confest’ (conference in the style of a festival) organized by Murdoch University and held in Fremantle, Western Australia, in June 1991. What follows are some partial—in the double sense of the word— observations about this selection of papers (and some of the themes raised by

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them), which is? as Meaghan Morris rightly remarks, quite a different thing from the conference itself. In making choices for some intellectual trajectories over others, however, I do not want to invalidate any of the whole repertoire of positions and perspectives that cultural studies has been able to articulate and continues to articulate. Although cultural studies can hardly pretend to provide an ‘ideal speech situation’, fostering ongoing discussion may still be the best we have. This, at least, is one of the lessons of ‘Dismantle Fremantle’ IV an event which turned out to be an exploration in the problems— theoretical and political—of taking cultural specificity seriously. This does complicate my speaking trajectory here, given the fact that the exploration centred so much on doing cultural studies in Australia, as I write as someone who only recently chose Australia as her new ‘home’—home in Meaghan Morris’s definition: ‘not a place of origin, but an “aspect” of a process which it enables […] but does not precede […] not an enclosure, but a way of going outside’ (1991:454). One of the explicit aims of ‘Dismantle Fremantle’ was to make a breach in what some see as rapidly solidifying orthodoxies within cultural studies. The use of Fremantle as a setting, within contemporary geopolitical relations ‘a town at the end of the earth’,2 even within Australia, was designed as a geographical gambit to counter what Graeme Turner (1991:640–53), in his aim to cultivate a specifically Australian cultural studies, has called the universalizing tendencies in cultural studies, particularly British cultural studies.3 In this sense, the comparatively marginal Australian perspective could provide the leverage—balancing on the thin line between pride and silliness, parochialism and unworldliness, cultural security and arrogance—to sensitize cultural studies as an international intellectual practice more fully to its own diverse and divergent conditions of operation and intervention in different locales and circumstances. At the same time Fremantle, sometimes advertised as the ‘cosmopolitan’ port city of the Perth metropolitan area, is also not that peripheral a place for cultural studies: it was around here that the forerunner of this very journal, the Australian Journal of Cultural Studies was established and produced for a number of years, before the board decided to let Routledge turn the publication into an international journal, entitled Cultural Studies—an interesting example of reverse diffusion indeed. What is at issue then are the terms of the internationalization of cultural studies. A meaningful, critical internationalism, as Kuan-Hsing Chen remarks in his essay, can only develop if and when there is mutual acknowledgement of and serious engagement with the differences and diversity of ‘our’ specific investments in and inventions of ‘cultural studies’. What is needed, therefore, is a dismantling of unifying and universalizing definitions of ‘cultural studies’, opening up a space for meaningful conversation. In this respect, ‘Dismantle Fremantle’ can be seen as a kind of talkback exercise in response to the largest international cultural studies gathering so far, the ‘Cultural Studies: Now and the Future’ conference held at the University of Illinois,

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USA, in 1990. This conference brought together an impressive range of speakers who have made very interesting and useful contributions to the repertoire of work that can be subsumed under the label ‘cultural studies’, but the sheer ambitiousness, in scale and scope, of the Illinois conference has paradoxically evoked a sense of unease with a perceived ‘Americanization’ of cultural studies that the conference was seen to represent. And despite the fact that instances of outright cultural anti-Americanism (e.g., in relation to popular culture) have often been faulted in British and European cultural studies as a form of élitist, Eurocentric conservatism, for many the threat of cultural studies being appropriated and taken over by the Americans proves to be rather intolerable… Quite certainly this would be an unintended effect of the conference, the organization of which was motivated at least in part by an understandable desire to put ‘cultural studies’ emphatically on the US academic agenda. But the very gesture toward comprehensiveness and prestigious authority displayed by the event—as articulated in the conference’s title—has raised complex problems about its unwitting politics. For one thing, the book that emerged from the conference proceedings is bulky: 700-plus dense pages long. As it is simply titled Cultural Studies, it runs the risk of being read as an attempt at totalizing definitiveness, a politics of closure resulting in a hegemonic demarcation of what ‘cultural studies’ is, despite overt refusals in the pages of the book to come up with fixed or unified theoretical positions and agendas. One often-heard complaint about US conceptions of critical intellectual work is that it tends to confine politics exclusively within the walls of academia4 —a perspective fiercely opposed by many British cultural-studies workers, whose self-conception relies more on more socially embedded forms of intellectual struggle and activism. Stuart Hall, for example, has pointed out the danger that the very growth of, and emphasis on, ‘theoretical fluency’ in American cultural studies might lead to ‘substituting intellectual work for politics’ in the ‘highly rarified and enormously elaborated and well-funded professional world of American academic life’ (1991:286). One could add here that it is precisely theoretical fluency—rather than localized, historically specific, empirical work—which is most likely to be invested with international prestige and to travel well transcontexually. Needless to say then that rampant academicism—traditionally a privileged site of abstract internationalist objectivism—might only heighten the bias toward universalism that Turner, among others, has argued against. Of course it would be misplaced to generalize about the (lack of) politics of cultural studies in the US in this manner. However, it is significant that Larry Grossberg (one of the organizers of the Illinois conference) in his talk at ‘Dismantle Fremantle’ located the political importance of cultural studies precisely in the context of what he saw as ‘the diminishing possibilities for politics’ in the USA. In fact, what was most interesting in Grossberg’s talk

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was that he was prompted to explicate the specificity of the conditions for doing cultural studies in contemporary America. In other words, the context of ‘Dismantle Fremantle’ gave Grossberg the opportunity to deuniversalize his American speaking position. This is one way in which, as Turner has put it, ‘cultural studies has a lot to gain from the margins’ (1991: 650). It is from the perspective of the margins that ‘the radically contextual, historically specific character of the production of knowledge within cultural studies itself’ is most clearly illuminated (‘Editorial’, 1991). Grossberg’s emphasis on the increasing impossibility of politics in the USA is in fact a strategic starting point to stake out new (though admittedly limited) possibilities for politics—‘impure” forms of politics—for critical intellectuals working within the academy (see Grossberg, 1988:66–9). If Grossberg’s US speaking position is informed by a sense of limited possibilities, however, at the other extreme it is the felt urgency for politics in today’s Taiwan which drives Chen’s (dis)investment in cultural studies. A similar sense of political urgency is at work in Steve Mickler’s critique of the coverage of Aboriginal ‘crime’ in Western Australian newspapers. It is in such cases that theoretical fluency in the purely academic sense becomes of secondary importance, although it is equally clear that neither Chen nor Mickler could have done without the necessary detour through theory enabled by the legacy of a few decades of cultural studies. In other words, theory does matter, not for its fluency tout court but for its potential to instil fluency in concrete understanding and analysis.5 It is within the field of theory that Tony Bennett’s intervention in the socalled ‘policy debate’ is to be placed. In many ways, this debate is about the politics of cultural studies, or more precisely, about the political pull of the speaking positions that are and are not encouraged by the directions taken by the intellectual practices subsumed under the banner of ‘cultural studies’. Bennett’s theoretical rewriting of the history of ‘culture’—less reliant on a reading of canonical texts and more on that of the multiple policy technologies aimed at the instrumentalization of ‘culture’ in the context of modern government—strikes me as a very useful one, particularly when taking into account, as Bennett himself indicates, the increasing dominance of English and its entrenched disciplinary privileging of (narrowly defined) textual analysis in cultural studies’ academic institutionalization.6 However, Bennett’s argument against the ‘moralized enunciative position’ of the cultural critic in f avour of the more practical one of the cultural technician proved to be a rather controversial one at the ‘Dismantle Fremantle’ conference, a situation exacerbated by the ruthless oppositioning of critic and technician foregrounded by proponents of a policy orientation.7 As if Foucault could have developed his insights about culture-as-technique without the adoption of a deeply committed, morally informed cultural-critical perspective in the first place! In other words, not only are cultural criticism and cultural policy by no means necessarily opposed to each other (on the

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contrary, as Tom O’Regan shows, they often feed into each other and operate within the same social space, if at different planes); without a strongly developed cultural criticism a lot of cultural policy, with its inevitably positivist tilt, would drift into a sterile politics of pragmatism.8 My scepticism here is informed by experience in another context. Having lived in the Netherlands for a quarter of a century has predisposed me rather more ambivalently towards the presumed haven of well-managed socialdemocratic culture that the pro-policy lobbyists seem eager to buy into. In the Netherlands as well as in a number of other countries in Northwest Europe (where social-democratic visions of culture are rife), as I have remarked earlier in this journal (Ang and Morley, 1989), there is very little space for any critical intellectual engagement in cultural politics except within the constraining mould of ‘relevance for policy’, be it government policy or industry policy. The result has been a de facto hegemony of complacent, topdown, rationalist, and instrumentalist discourses of culture, an emphasis on ‘cultural planning’ which tends to treat as nuisance—or as downright superfluous—an inquiry into some of the ‘irrationalities’ (to use Zoë Sofia’s inflection of this term) of the system. In the Netherlands this has been articulated, for instance, in a f ar more centralized, hierarchical, and rationalized academic research policy (accompanied by rigorous, stateinduced, reorganizations within universities in the early to mid-eighties) than in Australia. It is my hunch that it is for these reasons that cultural studies as we know it has difficulty in thriving in these countries; it is simply too recalcitrant in its insistence, say, on the significance of unplanned forms of cultural struggle in the realm of the everyday, sometimes even as a result— unintended, to be sure—of certain policy measures. This is simply to indicate how imposition of a policy orientation, which is implicitly based on an unwarranted absolutist faith in the benevolent state, can ultimately lead to a poverty of critical discourse, unable (or unwilling) to take account of the multidimensional intricacies and contradictions of relations of culture and power in modern societies, thereby overlooking the ‘other’ side of the benevolent state: the repression and violence that underlie the idea of the modern nation-state, as both Dipesh Chakrabarty and Luke Gibbons emphasize. Against this background, I find the religious desire to impose policy relevance among some practitioners of cultural studies in Australia, to use John Hartley’s term, rather astonishing. We could even be more emphatic: in a time when the forces of global capitalism are becoming ever more totalizing, it is all the more important to retain a sense of iconoclastic ‘negativism’ associated with the critique of hegemony. Zoë Sofia’s project to develop a psychoanalytic cultural studies on the basis of a politicized concept of sublimation is extremely compelling in this respect. For one thing, psychoanalytic discourse, the plague that Freud expected to bring to America on his first trip there, can provide us with one resource for reviving critical distance in the postmodern context through an

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uncovering of the ever more refined repressions of the capitalist/ patriarchal/ Western unconscious. Contrary to the prescriptions of the pro-policy lobby (which amount to the adoption of a ‘managerial imagination’), I think that cultural studies will continue to need for its own creativity the counterpoint of (historicized and contextualized) forms of what could be called the deconstructive imagination—it is one of its lifelines, a necessary underpinning of what Chakrabarty calls a ‘politics of despair’. What made ‘Dismantle Fremantle’ so special, in my view, was precisely that it provided an explicit context for the presentation and discussion of different trajectories of deconstructive imagining that can help dismantle, from the perspective of the margins, the universalisms of international cultural studies. So what is to be done if any genuinely critical internationalism is to be fostered in cultural studies—and we may have no choice in this age of increasing globalization, as Ken Wark suggests? From a specifically Australian perspective, how can the word ‘international’, to quote Meaghan Morris again, stop being ‘a euphemism for a process of streamlining work to be “interesting” to American and European audiences’? (1991:456) It is within the margins that the serious difficulties of international communication—a longstanding central theme within anthropology (as well as in the transnational corporate world!) but still largely unacknowledged within cultural studies—are most urgently experienced. Thus, Hartley’s concept of astonishment describes the breakdown of communication when different speaking positions meet in what Morris calls ‘bizarre non-encounters between incommensurable identities’, and she usefully adds that they ‘are made meaningful only by an effort to do something with the startling fact that they can occupy the same space.’ (1991: 455–6) Indeed, astonishment has to be made useful. It is clear that what needs to be done, first of all, is a scrupulous specification of those ‘incommensurable identities’, including the power relations that they enter into. However, if it is a specification of our respective speaking (and listening!) positions which is—minimally9—required for international conversation to make sense, then it would hardly suffice to take the national as a trusted and comfortable signifier for such a specification. Not only is what constitutes the national always subject to contestation, it is also the case that the national is always already ‘contaminated’ by the international. This plight is especially strongly felt from the perspective of the marginal, the subaltern, the postcolonial. This is exemplified in differences in the key concerns which preoccupy Britain and Australia respectively, as mapped out by Hartley. As an historical centre of the international order, Britain (still) luxuriates in inner-directed concerns such as ‘class’ and ‘quality’, themes presuming an unquestioned plenitude of national self-identity, which according to Gibbons is characteristic of the classic European model of the nation-state: seen this way, the British problematization of ‘class’ and

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‘quality’, including its take-up as central themes in British cultural studies, is understandable precisely in the light of a self-assured confidence in the very possibility of national perfection through intranational education and regulation.10 On the other hand, the Australian themes identified by Hartley, ‘identity’ and ‘exchange’, reveal a fundamental tendency for the marginal (ized) to have to define its identity in exchange, as Meaghan Morris puts it. Marginalization makes any sense of a fully self-contained and internally cohesive identity impossible: the very boundaries of marginal identity are uncertain as it is under constant pressure of more powerful external forces which it has to come to terms with; it is, as Luke Gibbons shows in his essay on Irish nationalism, an ‘identity without a centre’. However, a fixation on one’s own marginality can easily degenerate into inordinate self-righteousness, where the fact of being marginal itself is used as unproblematized source of comfortable resentment toward the ‘centre’.11 It is then, to resume Keating’s fine distinctions, that pride and silliness are in danger of spilling into one another, when being parochial becomes an apology for being unworldly, and where the quest for cultural security can paradoxically end up in (reverse) cultural arrogance, triggered by an exclusive sense of ‘uniqueness’—as we have seen in the recent explosion of reactionary nationalisms all over the world. To be a truly de-universalizing force, therefore, the marginal should resist fixing itself in the nationalist frame (although there is nothing wrong with using the national as resource); instead, it should make the most of its own hybridity, much like in the ‘antipodean’ writing strategies that Wark uncovers in Morris’s work. Since, as Wark says, the antipode is not a fixed space but a relational node, an antipodean perspective—‘a question of moving tactically along one cultural trajectory and then off on another’—avoids reifying the marginal: instead, it uses the fact of marginality itself as the very weapon to (temporarily) overcome it. It therefore opens up the way for a resolutely antideterminist (although certainly overdetermined) concept of centre/margin relations. This entails, of course, a nonabsolutist conception of marginality. As a dubiously postcolonial nation,12 Australia may be positioned as marginalized in relation to the erstwhile imperial power Britain, to the post-war neoimperialist power of the USA, and to the recent economic power of Japan, but it entertains much less unambiguous relations with other world regions and cultures. Its relation to the diverse nations of Europe, Africa and Asia, for example, could certainly not be described in terms of clear-cut centre/margin relations. One dimension that puts Australia resolutely on the side of the ‘centre’, for example, is that it is a predominantly white, English-speaking country, along with the advantages that this brings with it in the global framework. Let me illustrate what this means by briefly describing another context, one that I happen to know well. The Netherlands is a country with a reputation

xviii DISMANTLING ‘CULTURAL STUDIES’?

‘where everybody speaks English’. And indeed, there is a peculiar tendency among the Dutch to take it for granted rather lightheartedly that no foreigner speaks their language. Therefore, they tend to mindlessly accept the necessity to learn other languages (predictably, those of the more central linguistic powers)—a situation which by those less enthralled with the blessings of affirmative internationalism (as significant parts of the Dutch middle class are) would easily be interpreted as an insidious form of cultural imperialism! I will not go into the complex contradictions confronting speakers of a minor language in an affluent Western country here; suffice it to point out that one of the greatest insults to hurl at Dutch people, in my view, is to casually compliment them that they speak English so well. Such ‘flattery’, while generally appreciated, is ultimately patronizing as it disregards the enormous effort (and the difficulty) that goes into learning to be fluent in a language other than the mother tongue.13 It also tends to keep Dutch peculiarities at the convenient distance of ‘otherness’, relegated to the area of the inaccessible. As Abram de Swaan has put it, ‘Nederlanders die zich tegenover buitenlanders noodgedwongen moeten uitdrukken in een vreemde taal lijken net iets trager, net iets dommer dan ze zijn. (Dutch people who of necessity have to express themselves toward foreigners in a foreign language appear to be just a bit slower, a bit more stupid than they really are [my trans.].)’ (1991: 216) Of course, this is a problem that not only the Dutch face, but a very large part of the world’s population.14 I am saying this partly as a way of articulating my protest against any easy designation of a homogenized Europe as purely and simply the metropolitan ‘centre’. Not only do the boundaries between ‘centres’ and ‘margins’ shift; it is also the case that there are margins within any ‘centre’ and centres to any ‘margin’. This doesn’t invalidate Chakrabarty’s project of provincializing ‘Europe’, on the contrary; in certain aspects this important project, in its attempt to deconstruct and demystify European modernity, may even be relevant to some of the more peripheral nation-states within Europe today, particularly in the postcommunist countries. The problem I am hinting at is the indolent kind of crude, sloganistic accusations of ‘Eurocentrism’ (as sometimes expressed by postcolonials) which often amount to nothing more than a form of ‘counter-othering’, based on as much ignorance about the actual realities of contemporary European societies as they (rightly) level against classic European attitudes to their own places. This doesn’t mean that Europe isn’t Eurocentric—in fact it is, and becoming more so in a rather troubling manner—but that modern Eurocentrism15 should be analyzed in its concrete manifestations rather than merely imputed. I come to the conclusion then that attention to the complex dynamics of heterogeneous second-world relations at the multidimensional interfaces of, say, Australia/Ireland, Australia/India, Australia/Taiwan, Australia/The Netherlands, and so on ad infinitum—to remain at the (problematically unspecified) national plane of difference—may be much more challenging

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than the until now much more attended focus on postcolonial and/or imperial relations (with Britain and the USA particularly). Such little pursued trajectories of international conversation between partners without established, a priori hierarchies between and among them may bring about forms of novel and unforeseen cross-cultural knowledge. In fact, my relatively brief Australian experience has already provided me with a more astute grasp on the peculiarities of living in a country such as the Netherlands than I have ever had before. So I recognize Meaghan Morris’s difficulty in writing about the Australian ethic and practice of ‘mateship’ for an international audience, the constantly felt need to explain to others how ‘we’ do it, and so on.16 In relation to Anglo-American intellectual practices— including cultural studies—Dutch work is at least as marginalized as Australian work, if not more so at a very basic level: the numerous courses on ‘how to write an academic article in English’ offered at Dutch universities are testimony to this. It is all the more peculiar, therefore, to realize that the typical Dutch response is one of disavowal of the predicament rather than of active recognition of it: one thing that Dutch culture pertinently refuses to see is its own contemporary marginalization—a case of severe cultural repression indeed. (The Netherlands’ very identification with being part of ‘Europe’, aided by its peculiar geographical location, may be a source of the problem here: the resulting unconscious Eurocentrism, with its deeply ingrained historical self-confidence as the centre of the world, may actually impede a clear vision of the extent of the country’s cultural marginality today.17) I could see this cultural peculiarity only, however, when I became familiar with the rather different ways in which a similar predicament is being dealt with in Australia. If this—rather arbitrary—example of cross-cultural comparison teaches us something, then it is that surprising parallels can lie beneath equally imposing incommensurabilities. Such relatively uncharted trajectories of crossculturalism thus bring up and enlighten a whole new spectre of (im) possibilities for meaningful international exchange, the terms of which we can only invent as we go along. This is the single most exciting insight that I acquired from ‘Dismantle Fremantle’—both the conference and this issue of Cultural Studies. If cultural studies in the future can draw inspiration from this insight, then it can be home, an international intellectual home: a place where one can be proud to be parochial, but secure enough to avoid silly unworldliness—a place with no room for arrogance, so that one never stops going outside. Notes This article has benefited greatly from lengthy discussions with Jon Stratton, to whom my thanks. I also thank Toby Miller for his useful comments.

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1 ‘Keating uses Irish example to raise flag issue’, The Australian, 18 March 1992, p. 2. 2 As in the ‘Dismantle Fremantle’ flier, written by John Hartley. 3 See also Turner’s article on this issue. 4 For example, in his Crusoe’s Footsteps: Cultural Studies in Britain and America (1991) Patrick Brantlinger constructs a history of cultural studies as exclusively driven and determined by academic crises within the humanities and the social sciences. 5 And, therefore, struggle within academia does matter. 6 I particularly welcome Bennett’s move away from purely textual theorizations of ‘culture’, which opens up the possibility for more genuine interdisciplinarity between traditions from the humanities and the social sciences. 7 Read paradoxically and perversely (in Ken Wark’s terms), Bennett’s intervention might in fact be refracted as a contribution to a more effective cultural criticism— one that goes beyond a preoccupation with the textual and is more fully engaged with social arrangements and technologies of ‘culture’—rather than serving as a prescription for a wholesale ‘turn toward policy’. 8 Of course, there are both good and bad forms of cultural criticism, as there are good and bad forms of cultural policy. To establish what is ‘good’ and what is ‘bad’ is itself a necessary undertaking for a (self-reflective) cultural criticism. 9 It may sound banal, but what is even more minimally needed in this respect is an attitude of simply caring for what is happening elsewhere. This is easier said than done: indifference not to difference as such but to the specificity of differences is rampant, as is exemplified in the figure of the transnational cosmopolitan. 10 Although Britain’s entrance into the European community has brought to the surface a different, rather uncomfortable theme for the British: that of British marginalization. 11 This happens, for example, where Graeme Turner posits himself as ‘victim’ of the lack of attention to cultural specificity in British cultural studies (1991:652). A more productive image, because it recognizes the thoroughly ambiguous, mutually constitutive relationship between centre and margin emanating from the history of colonialism, is that of the ‘complicit postcolonial’, as developed by Bob Hodge and Vijay Mishra (1991). 12 The term ‘dubiously postcolonial’ to describe Australia comes from Meaghan Morris (in this issue). 13 In this sense, problems around the international unsaleability of the Australian accent, as in the film and TV industry, are really of a rather different order. A popular Australian soap opera easily appears on one of the main Dutch TV channels. On the other hand, a popular Dutch sitcom will at most have a chance to be shown on SBS, the fringe ‘multicultural’ channel, in Australia. 14 The little problematized hegemony of English is also reflected in our relative ignorance about the interesting developments in Latin American cultural studies, for example. See e.g., Alan O’Connor (1991). 15 Needless to say that there is Australian Eurocentrism too. 16 I had this problem, for instance, in having to explain the Dutch cultural formation of ‘pillarization’. See e.g., Desperately Seeking the Audience, chapter 13.

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17 Dutch colonial history is another entry for understanding here. In a sense, having been a world empire still informs Dutch cultural self-assuredness today: colonialist attitudes (just as patriarchal ones) die hard.

References Ang, Ien (1991) Desperately Seeking the Audience, London: Routledge. Ang, Ien and Morley, David (1989) ‘Mayonnaise culture and other European follies’, Cultural Studies 3(2), 133–44. Brantlinger, Patrick (1991) Crusoe’s Footsteps: Cultural Studies in Britain and America, New York: Routledge. de Swaan, Abram (1991) ‘Het Nederlands in het Europese talenstelsel’, in Ton Zwaan et al., editors, Het Europese Labyrint, Amsterdam: Boom/Siswo. ‘Editorial statement’ (1991) Cultural Studies 6(1). Grossberg, Lawrence (1988) It’s a Sin, Sydney: Power Publications. Grossberg, Lawrence, Nelson, Cary and Treichler, Paula (1991) editors, Cultural Studies, New York: Routledge. Hall, Stuart (1991) ‘Cultural Studies and its theoretical legacies’, in Grossberg, Nelson and Treichler (1991) 277–86. Hodge, Bob and Mishra, Vijay (1991) ‘What is post(-)colonialism?’, Textual Practice 5 (3), 399–414. ‘Keating uses Irish example to raise flag issue’ (1992) The Australian 18 March 1992. Morris, Meaghan (1991) ‘On the beach’, in Grossberg, Nelson and Treichler (1991), 450– 78. O’Connor, Alan (1991) ‘The emergence of cultural studies in Latin America’, Critical Studies in Mass Communication 8(1) 60–73. Turner, Graeme (1991) ‘“It works for me”: British cultural studies, Australian cultural studies, Australian film’, in Grossberg, Nelson and Treichler (1991) 640–53.

• ARTICLES •

STEVE MICKLER

VISIONS OF DISORDER: ABORIGINAL PEOPLE AND YOUTH CRIME REPORTING1

On 28 February 1990 Western Australians awoke to a troubling headline across the front page of the State’s major daily tabloid. On their way to work that morning, commuters passed posters, on the footpaths in front of suburban newsagents and on the corners of city streets, that reproduced, in large type, The West Australian’s main news of the day: ‘Aboriginal gangs terrorise suburbs’ (fig. 1). As far as Western Australian news media discourses about Aborigines go, the ‘gangs’ story, as it has come to be known, is the ‘had to happen one day’ story. For many years Aborigines in Perth have complained about what they believe to be incessant news media persecution. These complaints have been voiced strenuously to the Royal Commission Into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody, the Human Rights Commission National Inquiry Into Racist Violence, the Australian Press Council, the Australian Broadcasting Tribunal, not to mention the chiefs of newspapers, radio and TV news programs themselves. Anti-Aboriginal media stories have led Aborigines to establish an Aboriginal-Media Liaison Group with sympathetic journalists, to campaign for the removal of a particularly offensive radio commentator,2 and have also given impetus to moves to set up Aboriginalcontrolled radio stations in Perth and other towns. So Aboriginal people are by no means passive recipients of news media visions of themselves and broader issues of race relations and representation. Indeed, they have also become active participants in setting and influencing public agendas. Aborigines are acutely aware of the power of news media to create or reproduce public knowledges about race relations, common senses about Aboriginality. Bitter experience has shown all too often how news media constructions of issues involving Aborigines establish the limits of what can and cannot be articulated about them, establish readerships positioned from within a consensus of common sense, and claim for these representations a truth grounded in an ever-present externalized power called ‘public opinion’. However artificial it may be, ‘public opinion’ is for many Aborigines real enough, a thing which governments claim to be powerless in the face of, and thence they will not support Aboriginal land rights, not respect sacred sites,

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Figure 1

not accept the need for special funding for Aboriginal programs, will scarcely lift a finger against police persecution. Nowadays Aboriginal aff airs form a staple of press and TV news, and this is in no minor way the result of Aboriginal activity itself. Certainly much media coverage exists as a kind of performance space for the ritual playing out

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of white Australian desires and anxieties, of renegotiating the bipolarity of the tribal and the modern, of revisualizing the boundaries of the deviant and the normal, Nation and Others. While it is a space in which Aborigines are increasingly active performers, pressing all the time for better roles, lines and scripts, as Christine Jennett points out, it is a decidedly white-Australiancontrolled theatre: Media images of and messages about Australian Aborigines are constructed by non-Aborigines operating within the dominant AngloEuropean cultural framework for consumption principally by those who share this framework. The reasons for this are located within the history of colonisation of Aborigines by Anglo-Europeans, whose powerful members retain cultural hegemony in Australian society; because they own the means of production, distribution and exchange they also control the dissemination of information about and images of minority groups. Nowhere has this been so all encompassing as in the case of the Aboriginal national minority (1983:28). I concur with Jennett’s position, which permits a situating of certain news media practices within an array of technologies of repression within an ongoing process of colonization. With this brief indication of the political position from which I proceed, I will move into the more specific background to the material presented here: it is a small portion of what I compiled during my work as a researcher for the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody, specifically for Commissioner Patrick Dodson’s volumes on the economic, social and legal issues that underlie the deaths and the high rate of imprisonment of Aboriginal people. My brief was to examine the representation of Aboriginal people and issues by news media in Western Australia, to draw conclusions as to the significance of media representations within the cyclical reproduction of the web of hostile and exclusionary social relationships in which Aboriginal people find themselves, and to suggest a range of reforms to media policy, journalistic practices and interventionary measures to empower Aboriginal people. While there is certainly a need to analyze the full range of media discourse about Aboriginality, I have selected for this paper the emergence of a particular news discourse about Aboriginal youth in Western Australia over the past two years. Specifically, there has occurred a dramatically increased visualizing of Aboriginal youth as criminals, as major instigators of disorder, by Perth newspapers. Crime reporting, particularly where Aboriginality is identified for no apparent reason, draws the strongest criticism from Aboriginal people themselves. It is the association of Aboriginality with criminality which arguably has the most serious material implications for Aboriginal people,

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reproducing preconditions for intense police persecution, institutional discrimination and common racism. Ericson, Baranek, and Chan point out that structuring the production of news in general is an institutional desire for the visualization of deviance. Deviance, its control and its opposite, normality, are in fact the primary discursive objects of news making: Deviance and control are not only woven into the seamless web of news reporting, but are actually part of its fibre: they define not only the object and central character of news stories, but also the methodological approaches of journalists as they work on their stories (1987:4–5). It is difficult to nominate a news image more signifying of disorder and deviance in Perth than that of Aboriginal youths. In a sense, ‘reds under the beds’ has become ‘blacks behind the wheel of your car’. In 1960, at the height of assimilationism, the news media’s ‘Aboriginal problem’ was not represented as a threat to white society, but a question of assisting what were seen as a ‘primitive’ nomadic people to make the ‘transition’ into that society. State and church systems of regulation, surveillance and paternal ‘care’ were firmly in place. In the very broadest terms then, this ‘Aboriginal problem’ as visualized in media had gone from being ‘under control’ in 1960 to ‘out of control’ by the present, and thus ultimately presenting a sense of threat to established orders. The watershed marking this shift was the controversy surrounding the WA government’s political motioning to legislate Aboriginal land rights in the mid-1980s. In this period, a concentrated anti-land rights media campaign by miners, pastoralists and opposition parties—one TV ad depicting black hands building a brick wall across a map of the state—contributed to turning what opinion pollsters deemed to be ‘ambivalent public attitudes’ into what they called ‘hardened opposition’ not only to land rights, but almost any form of concession to Aboriginal demands (ANOP, 1985). From 1983 to 1989 riots and protests in country towns provided sumptuous spectacles for the frontpage imaging of disorder. Needless to say, disorder in public places were the eminently reportable events rather than the conditions for the crisis of Aboriginal life. Youth in general, of course, are traditionally available within news production, as bearers of moral panic. Throughout 1990 in Western Australia I suggest that the conflux of being black, young and so on the Other side of the Law provided the raw material for a particularly potent media-driven moral panic that has enormously increased the availability of Aboriginal youth as a signifier for certain types of crime and antisocial behaviour, a signifier historically attached to white working-class youth. From February to July 1990 Aboriginal youth were the specific objects of sensational page-one stories on four occasions. They were featured in many

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other reports on other pages over this period, and I will be looking at some of these historically, but it is these four front-pages on which I wish to focus. Their positioning made them the major news of the day, but also the circumstances of their production including the timing of their appearance provided a rare opportunity to gain a better grasp of the interplay between two powerful institutional forces—the journalistic practices of visualizing deviance and the state forces which have stakes in maintaining public agendas within which ‘Aboriginal’ crime may be not only meaningful, but useful to the agencies of social control. As Ericson, Baranek and Chan say, news is itself an active control agency. Let’s return to The West Australian headline I began with: ‘Aboriginal gangs terrorise suburbs’. The lead paragraph tells of police fears that ‘the situation is getting out of control’. Two days after the story appeared 45 ABC journalists wrote to the editor of the paper to complain that: The story proper contained no hard news link to any event or alleged event of the preceding 24 hours. The ‘suburbs’ turned out to be just three adjoining ones. Nobody identified as Aboriginal was quoted on the front page. The story reported allegations by police officers, and hoteliers, and their staff. There was just one allegation detailed which involved a serious attack on a suburbanite in a street. Otherwise the article comprised general remarks by police officers and more specific allegations by persons involved in selling liquor. Alleged crimes at liquor outlets do not amount to terrorised suburbs.3 The journalists’ letter, which The West Australian declined to publish, together with other evidence that the story was of a special kind, that it was an extreme manifestation of the more routinely deployed media discourses about Aborigines, underlined the need for further inquiry. The reporter who wrote the story told me she had ‘no idea the report was to be given front-page treatment’ and seemed a little surprised but guarded about saying much else except that she had been ‘tipped off about the story’ by a Channel 9 TV news reporter who covered a meeting of irate publicans and civic authorities the previous evening (27 February). Headlines are written by sub-editors, who also determine the positioning of a story, so the most excessive and inflammatory aspects of this story were not in fact the responsibility of the reporter who wrote it. The Channel 9 TV reporter thought The West Australian’s headline was ‘over the top’ and ‘inflammatory’. He said that the issue involved ‘six to eight or a dozen young Aborigines shop-lifting’, and could even identify a block of flats in nearby Inglewood where most of these youths lived. Indeed, interviews with suburban police, in whose areas the alleged gang terror occurred, showed that the headline was, even within news media’s own rather elastic conception of fact, groundless. I point out that the following statements are not from the senior police from Police Headquarters on whose

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statements the story was largely based. The Police Officer-in-Charge of Bayswater Police Station told me the article was ‘disgraceful’ and that the press had ‘blown that out of all proportion’.4 He also said that ‘it is actually quite quiet around here […] we only have a few incidents involving Aboriginal youth’. He described the article as ‘a piece of shit’, which he was prepared to ‘stand up in a court of law’ to refute. To me there was nothing in it. I would have thought they [reporters] would have come to talk to the Officer-in-Charge of the station here. The Aboriginal problem here is no greater than anywhere else. He strongly refuted the claims of gangs terrorizing the area, or that the ‘situation was getting out of control’. There had been some minor offences, including petty acts of shop-lifting and theft of petrol. We had a few house break-ins, but you can’t put them down to Aboriginals. I don’t know anything about ‘30 Aboriginals’. It has not been reported to us. He thought the incidents which the article turned into gang terror amounted to the theft of a cash register from a tavern by three Aboriginal youths who were later arrested by police from another station, the alleged assault on a young woman and her male partner at the Bayswater railway station by Aboriginal youths, and a brawl at the Maylands Tavern which involved Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal adult drinkers. These incidents, he said, were isolated from each other. The crime figures from the Bayswater Police Station do not support the headline. For instance, in February 1990, at the height of the alleged ‘gang terror’, not a single charge was laid against an Aboriginal youth while three non-Aboriginal youths were arrested for offences including breaking and entering, and stealing. No Aboriginal youths had been sent before the Children’s Court Panel or taken into any form of custody. In the same month five Aboriginal and seventeen non-Aboriginal adults had been arrested.5 Police at neighbouring Maylands presented a very similar picture. A woman constable described the most serious of the incidents involving Aboriginal people as ‘isolated’ and stated that the police had more trouble with ‘white street kids’ than Aboriginal youths.6 There is useful indication here as to the news shift that has occurred, from white youth to Aboriginal youth as the privileged bearers of disorder. She said there had been ‘a bit of a problem in February’ from one Aboriginal family, which had since left the area.

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This thing certainly did not deserve this sort of headline. Maylands certainly does not have the problem some people think it has. We don’t get really serious offences here. Ninety per cent of complaints relate to NPPs [No Particular Persons] and most people eventually charged are white. We have a high rate of petty crime, stealing, but the majority of those involved are white. Aboriginal crime has remained pretty standard for the past 18 months with no rise in incidents. She strongly refuted claims that ‘racial tensions were rising’ and that the ‘situation was getting out of control’ in Maylands. The only people we’ve been arresting for multiple house break-ins are white people such as drug addicts and street kids. If they [reporters] had looked at the Maylands figures [police arrest book] they would prove that. We’ve never had a call from The West Australian. Her reaction when first reading the ‘Aboriginal gangs’ story: ‘I thought… you’ve got to be joking! They’re in it for a headline.’ The Maylands police records are similarly revealing. In February 1990 only 7 Aboriginal people were arrested; 5 adults and 2 juveniles, out of a total of 35 arrests. In January, 5 Aboriginal adults were arrested and one Aboriginal juvenile within a total of 27 arrests.7 I believe these comments from police officers patrolling the streets where the alleged gang terror occurred, together with the data from the police arrest books, show that no such terror took place. At most what occurred was a series of isolated incidents involving Aboriginal people. The only hard reportable event on which to hang the story was a meeting of irate hotel owners and senior police: a production of Aboriginal youth by their adversaries, presented as page-one truth by the West. Under what conditions of possibility could this story, with patently no factual basis, appear? The circumstances of its timing are, I believe, significant. It appeared five days before the long-awaited commencement of the Royal Commission hearing into the most controversial death of an Aborigine in police custody. Sixteen year-old John Pat died in a police cell in Roebourne, Western Australia, in 1983, after being assaulted by police. In 1985 the police officers were acquitted of killing the youth, but enormous controversy has surrounded the case ever since. The ‘gangs’ story’s most authoritative sources of comment were, significantly, senior police officers based at Police Headquarters in East Perth. For instance, a Chief Superintendent is quoted in the article: ‘I don’t like picking on the Aborigines, but they are the ones creating the problems in this area’. It would not be unreasonable to suspect that such a sensational and threatening headline about Aboriginal youth could be useful to the police as a timely reminder to readers of what is frequently conceived as the ‘thin blue line’ between order and chaos. Police influence on news treatment of crime,

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Figure 2

and the dependence of news media on police and courts as a daily source of visualizable deviance has been well documented and theorized internationally. Information given to the Royal Commission by a number of Western Australian journalists suggested that the influence of WA Police on the reporting of incidents and issues involving Aborigines was extraordinary to say the least. For example, Jim Magnus of the Daily News, a reporter with some 35 years experience in Perth covering both police and Aboriginal affairs rounds, submitted that stories critical of police treatment of Aborigines were often simply spiked for no other reason than that they would offend the ‘major supplier of headlines’. So dependent were Perth newspapers on police for dramatic crime stories that police were able to affect the marketability of a newspaper by simply cutting off the supply. By this means, police could regulate the editorial positions of the paper if editors failed to exercise the normal self-regulation.8 Yet, there is another circumstance to consider. Buried down on the bottom of page four of the same edition of the paper was a small report telling of a massive financial loss by the Bell Resources group. At $860 million it constituted the greatest corporate loss in Australian business history. Bell Resources was, at the time, a Western Australian company owned by beleaguered one-time Perth billionaire and America’s Cup yachting hero Alan Bond. It was unquestionably the stuff of front-page news, and indeed it was in most of the major Eastern States’ press. Bell Resources also owned The West Australian. Indeed the West’ s headline of the very next day, good news for

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Bond, proves the point: ‘Bond victory—court removes receivers’: not a word about gangs. A financial disaster for the corporate owner of The West Australian was effectively down-played while a relatively minor and localized series of incidents allegedly involving Aboriginal people, in a few suburbs, was blown up to formidable proportions. In February 1991 the Australian Press Council cleared The West Australian of any breach of its principles over the ‘gangs’ article and dismissed a formal complaint by the Director of the Aboriginal Legal Service. Some weeks after the ‘gangs’ story on 18 May The West Australian ran another front-page headline, ‘Aborigines in half high speed chases’ (fig. 2). The accompanying article quoted figures from a ‘previously unreleased police report’ showing that ‘more than half the young criminals caught in high-speed chases by the police are Aboriginal’. The headline and story are based on a police report, which, it can be read halfway through the article, ‘was conducted from May to August last year’. It can be questioned why a report of nine-month-old police statistics was splashed across page one as if it was of burning interest and relevance to readers. The article came at the end of a week of extraordinary media treatment of high-speed car chases and juvenile delinquency, much of which, importantly, was directly attributed to Aboriginal youth. The week saw major reports with photos and headlines in Perth’s two main newspapers for four consecutive days with press and TV reporters travelling around in police cars, calls for tougher police measures and powers to deal with youth offenders, stiffer penalties from the courts and hasty reactions from government and opposition politicians. The 14 to 18 May 1990 campaign can be properly described as a police-and-media-driven ‘moral panic’ over youth delinquency, with heavy overtones of persecution of Aboriginal youth (fig. 3). The narrative of this moral panic or ‘media wave’ moved from crimes to panic by authorities, to calls for a police crack-down, to the crack-down itself. Although both black and white youth were arrested, Aboriginality was specified in numerous reports and editorials, in contravention of both the AJA’s Journalist Code of Ethics and the Principles of the Australian Press Council. The lead paragraph of an ‘on the spot’ report of the arrest of car thieves is a telling example. ‘A breathless and angry Senior Constable Mark Jenkins slapped the handcuffs on an Aboriginal youth. “What if you had killed someone’s wife and…children?”’ (Daily News 15th May 1990). This in spite of the fact that the arrested youths in accompanying photographs were not identifiably Aboriginal. Just in case the reader didn’t get the message, as figure 2 shows—police statistics piped straight through to the front page of that Friday’s West make certain they do. Again, four days before this media storm over youth car stealing and other offences, Judge Hal Jackson of the Perth Children’s Court, in an address to the Perth Press Club, was critical of police practices toward youth. He

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repeatedly drew attention to the failure of police methods in dealing with juvenile crime and called for police to adopt alternatives to charging youth offenders. He also emphasized the underlying historic and social issues associated with Aboriginal involvement with the criminal justice system.9 Two days later in an article in the Sunday Times (13.5.90) the judge criticized politicians and the media for ‘whipping up an irrational “jail-them mentality” among the public’. It so happened that immediately after these criticisms from a senior member of judiciary, the media and the police managed to create an atmosphere of civil emergency over youth crime, in support of the argument for tougher penalties and increased police powers to monitor and regulate youth behaviour. Indeed the front page of the Daily News of 15 May (‘60 Minutes of Terror: Club Wielding Gang Attacks Young Woman’), the report which heralded the beginning of this unprecedented week of mediatized war on youth, could not have been a more devastating rebuke to Judge Jackson’s criticisms made just two days later (Fig. 3). The media tirade also came before two critical State by-elections, a particularly vulnerable time for a government, when law and order issues are felt heavily to influence political fortunes. This is doubtless an opportune time for police to press for increased powers, resources, pay and conditions, and tougher sentencing of offenders, or simply to remind political parties of their influential position. It was also, I believe, significant that the Royal Commission cross-examination of police officers involved with the death of John Pat commenced in Perth on Monday 14 May. The local news media paid scant attention to this, the Daily News not covering it all and The West Australian carrying a single report on page 31 two days later on 16 May, by which time of course almost the entire Perth news media was preoccupied with the youth crime crisis. This was in marked contrast to the front-page coverage given by The West Australian to the appearance of new witnesses for the police at the beginning of the John Pat hearing on 7 March. Thus there were three distinct reasons why those police with responsibility for managing police image would have had high stakes in a such an excessive pageant of youth crime—read Aboriginal youth crime—at that moment: criticism from the judiciary; a pre-election government vulnerable to law-andorder crises; and police under the spotlight over the jail death of an Aboriginal youth. The fourth front page concerns the controversy over the public naming of a sixteen-year-old Aboriginal youth who escaped from Longmore Detention Centre on 10 July 1990. The youth had been sentenced for unlawful use of a motor vehicle and faced other charges relating to the earlier mentioned alleged gang attack on the suburban home of a woman, a case which continued to be listed in the media as part of the continuing juvenile ‘crime wave’ or ‘crisis’. The Children’s Court Act, which prohibits the public identification of juvenile offenders, was breached, both by the police, in

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Figure 3

releasing the youth’s name and photograph, and the media, for publishing and broadcasting them. The Daily News carried a large front-page mug-shot of the youth with the headline ‘Police Name Violent Boy’ which constructed the boy as ‘Public Enemy No. 1’ (fig. 4). The police claimed the release of the youth’s identity was justified on the grounds that it would assist with his

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recapture and alert an unwary public. Both the WA Minister for Police and the Attorney-General supported the identification of the youth, a move which leading Aboriginal organizations and civil-rights lawyers condemned as placing the police above the law.10 In a media statement, Rob Riley, Director of the Aboriginal Legal Service, pointed to the effect of such treatment in reproducing race hatred: One can only conclude that the police and some in the news media are joining forces to deliberately portray the image of Aboriginal youth as the major threat to the order of white society, and that this is a profoundly racist and provocative course of action on their parts. Riley called on the State government to: halt what is amounting to a racist persecution of Aboriginal youth by the police and media. Aboriginal youth are being made the scapegoats for the complete failure of the government and the wider society to redress the underlying social issues which cause young people to get in trouble with the law.11 The Premier, Carmen Lawrence, eventually voiced her ‘dismay’ over the incident publicly five days later.12 Instead of identifying the police and the news media as the creators of the youth crime ‘crisis’ she displaced the responsibility onto the ‘community’ which ‘focuses too heavily on juvenile crime’. ‘We are developing an attitude in this state which is verging on becoming hysterical’. Thus the Premier simply covered over the mediapolice-government nexus behind the intensified representation of Aboriginal youth as threatening to order and public safety. What I have attempted to demonstrate are the political conditions under which Western Australian news discourses about youth crime became racialized in 1990, to such an extent that any reference to youth-related crime, and specifically car theft, suggests to the reader, that is ‘the community’, that Aborigines are culpable. White ‘street kids’, the objects of intense media attention throughout the 1980s, virtually dropped off the news map in this period. The conditions for this shift are to be found, not in any increase in criminal activity by Aboriginal youth,13 but rather in the almost symbiotic relationship between the news media and the police concerning crime reporting, the police being under intense scrutiny at this particular time by three high-level government and judicial inquiries that were focusing on their treatment of Aboriginal people.14 Added to this are stubborn resistances within some influential sections of the judiciary to police demands for increased powers to regulate youth and for harsher court punishments. Handed to journalists and editors in this period is

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Figure 4

an unprecedented quantity of dramatic youth-crime data, tip-offs, pre-written stories on the fax machine, generous access to police operations, all of which

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combine to provide an inexpensive means of visualizing a deviance that is par excellence young, black and streetwise. The bottom-line effect of this was that within that short space of a few months, thematic news and current affairs representations of Aboriginal youth as victims of police harassment and violence, which had steadily built up around the Royal Commission Into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody and the other inquiries mentioned above since the mid-1980s, and which were symbolized by John Pat’s death, had shifted 180 degrees to a framing of Aboriginal youth as the greatest single threat to public safety, with police cast as embattled and under-resourced public defenders.15 I am arguing that the news production of Aboriginal youth criminals has to be seen in the context of at least an industrial relationship between police and news media within which reporting is policing, policing is reportable and reporting is policible. Police-inspired disorder I would like, as an afterword, to offer a final illustration. On the evening of 10 December 1989 the Lockridge Aboriginal camp, in the Perth suburb of Guildford, was raided by dozens of heavily armed police from the Tactical Response Group. According to witnesses, the police dragged men, women and children out of their demountable homes and terrorized them at gunpoint. Police were later to claim they acted on an anonymous tip-off that unlicensed firearms were held in the camp, although none was found and no charges were laid. An investigation into the raid was promised by the Minister for Police. The residents of Lockridge camp have taken criminal action against the police involved. It is noteworthy that the raid took place less than two weeks after the leader of the Lockridge group, Robert Bropho, had publicly given evidence of police brutality against his people to the Human Rights Commission’s National Inquiry Into Racist Violence.16 Bropho’s appearance at the hearing was reported by The West Australian. One would have thought that such allegations of police terror, especially as the police had promised an internal inquiry, and coming as it did so quickly after the hearing, would have been the subject of fairly intense media attention. Yet, press coverage was subdued, with The West Australian’s initial report appearing on page four entitled ‘Police pointed guns at us: Aborigines’.17 At the very least here was a missed opportunity for a front-page headline: ‘Police gang terrorizes Aboriginal camp.’

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Notes 1 I thank John Hartley for his helpful suggestions and editorial advice during the preparation of this article. 2 Howard Sattler, host of the ‘talk-back’ program, The Sattler File, of Radio 6PR. 3 Doug Spencer et al. of ABC Radio letter to Paul Murray, Editor of The West Australian, Perth, Western Australia, 2 March 1990. 4 Sgt Balfour Black, interviewed by S.Mickler of the Royal Commission Into Aboriginal Deaths In Custody (RCIADC), Perth, 19 July 1990, from notes. 5 Cited by S.Mickler of the RCIADC, Perth, 19 July 1990. 6 Constable Sally Holt, interviewed by S.Mickler of the RCIADC, Perth, 19 July 1990. 7 Cited by S.Mickler of RCIADC, Perth, 19 July 1990. 8 Daily News journalist Jim Magnus, RCIADC transcript, Perth, 30 May 1990. 9 Hal Jackson, Law for All and All for Law, address to the Perth Press Club, 11 May 1990. 10 Rob Riley of the WA Aboriginal Media Association (WAAMA) and Ted Wilkes of the Perth Aboriginal Medical Service (AMS) in The West Australian, 12 July 1990; Rene Le Miere of the WA Law Reform Society, The West Australian 13 July 1990; Richard Utting, lawyer, The West Australian, 14 July 1990. 11 Rob Riley, press statement, Perth, 12 July 1990. 12 The West Australian, 14 July 1990, p. 7. 13 Interesting indeed are WA Police statistics on youth crime which show that the number of apprehensions of Aboriginal youth in the Perth metropolitan area for common categories of offences in 1990 had either remained more or less the same as the previous year or, in the case of car theft, actually decreased dramatically (by 40 per cent). (In fact, the number of non-Aboriginal youth apprehensions similarly remained the same or decreased). WA Police Department—CRR9243A, Weekly Apprehensions for Youth for the Perth Metropolitan Area Only for the Period Between 01 Jan 89 to 31 Dec 89 and 01 Jan 90 to 31 Dec 90. Printed out for the author on 3 December 1991. For a revealing study of the relationship between news media’s crime waves and actual rates of crime see Mark Fishman (1981). 14 These were the Royal Commission Into Aboriginal Deaths In Custody, the Human Rights Commission’s National Inquiry Into Racist Violence and the WA Equal Opportunity Commission report on police treatment of Aboriginal people. 15 Formal public policy outcomes came, after two years of escalating public controversy, in February 1992 with the WA government’s highly contested legislating of the harshest juvenile offence penalties in Australia. The legislation, which, among other things, sets mandatory minimum prison sentences of 18 months for repeat offenders, and a mandatory 20 years for causing death associated with car theft, is seen as a clear victory for police and ‘law and order’ trumpeting political and media forces. 16 National Inquiry Into Racist Violence, Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, Transcripts, Perth Hearings, 29 November 1989. 17 The West Australian, 11 December 1990.

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References ANOP (January 1985) Land Rights, Winning Middle Australia, An Attitude and Communications Research Study, presented to the Department of Aboriginal Affairs, Canberra. Ericson, Richard V., Baranek, Patricia M. and Chan, Janet B.L. (1987) Visualizing Deviance: A Study of News Organization, Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Fishman, Mark (1981) ‘Crime waves as ideology’, in Cohen, S. and Young, J. editors, The Manufacture of News, London: Constable. Jennett, C. (1983) ‘White media rituals about Aboriginals’, Media Information Australia 30 (November).

Acknowledgment Photographs (Figs 1 and 2) by courtesy of the West Australian.

DIPESH CHAKRABARTY

PROVINCIALIZING EUROPE: POSTCOLONIALITY AND THE CRITIQUE OF HISTORY1

In the academic discourse of history—that is, ‘history’ as a discourse produced at the institutional site of the university—‘Europe’ remains the sovereign, theoretical sub ject of all histories, including the ones we call ‘Indian’, ‘Chinese’, ‘Kenyan’, etc. There is a peculiar way in which all these other histories tend to become variations on a master narrative that could be called ‘the history of Europe’. In this sense, ‘Indian’ history itself is in a position of subalternity; one can only articulate subaltern subject-positions in the name of history. That Europe works as a silent referent in historical knowledge itself becomes obvious in a highly ordinary way. There are at least two everyday symptoms of the subalternity of non-Western, third-world histories. Thirdworld historians feel a need to refer to works in European history; historians of Europe do not feel any need to reciprocate. Whether it is an Edward Thompson, a Le Roy Ladurie, a George Duby, a Carlo Ginzberg, a Lawrence Stone, a Robert Darnton or a Natalie Davis—to take but a few names at random from our contemporary world—the ‘greats’ and the models of the historian’s enterprise are always at least culturally ‘European’. ‘They’ produce their work in relative ignorance of, say, non-Western histories and this does not seem to affect the quality of their work. This is a gesture, however, that ‘we’ cannot return. We cannot even afford an equality or symmetry of ignorance at this level without taking the risk of appearing ‘oldfashioned’ or ‘outdated’. This problem of asymmetric ignorance is not simply a matter of ‘cultural cringe’ (to let my Australian self speak) on our part or of cultural arrogance on the part of the European historian. These problems exist but can be relatively easily addressed. Nor do I mean to take anything from the achievements of the historians I mentioned. Our footnotes bear rich testimony to the insights we have derived from their knowledge and creativity. The dominance of ‘Europe’ as the subject of all histories is a part of a much more profound theoretical condition under which historical knowledge is produced in the third world. This condition ordinarily expresses itself in a paradoxical manner. It is this paradox that I shall describe as the second everyday

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symptom of our subalternity, and it refers to the very nature of social-science pronouncements themselves. For generations now, philosophers and thinkers shaping the nature of social science have produced theories embracing the entirety of humanity. As we well know, these statements have been produced in relative, and sometimes absolute, ignorance of the majority of the humankind, i.e., those living in nonWestern cultures. This in itself is not paradoxical for the more self-conscious of European philosophers have always sought theoretically to justify this stance. The everyday paradox of third-world social science is that we find these theories, in spite of their inherent ignorance of ‘us’, eminently useful in understanding our societies. What allowed the modern European sages to develop such clairvoyance with regard to societies of which they were empirically ignorant? Why cannot we, once again, return the gaze? There is an answer to this question in the writings of philosophers who have read into European history an entelechy of universal reason, if we regard such philosophy as the self-consciousness of social science. Only ‘Europe’, the argument would appear to be, is theoretically (i.e., categorically, at the level of the fundamental categories that shape historical thinking) knowable; all other histories are matters of empirical research that fleshes out a theoretical skeleton that is substantially ‘Europe’. Such an epistemological proposition underlies Marx’s use of categories like ‘bourgeois’ and ‘pre-bourgeois’ or ‘capital’ and ‘pre-capital’. The prefix ‘pre’ here signifies a relationship that is both chronological and theoretical. The coming of the bourgeois or capitalist society, Marx argues in the Grundrisse and elsewhere, gives rise for the first time to a history that can be apprehended through a philosophical and universal category, ‘capital’. History becomes, for the first time, theoretically knowable. All past histories are now to be known (theoretically, that is) from the vantage point of this category, that is, in terms of their differences from it.2 To continue with Marx’s words: Even the most abstract categories, despite their validity—precisely because of their abstractness—for all epochs, are nevertheless,… themselves…a product of historical relations. Bourgeois society is the most developed and the most complex historic organisation of production. The categories which express its relations, the comprehension of its structure, thereby also allow insights into the structure and the relations of production of all the vanished social formations out of whose ruins and elements it built itself up, whose partly still unconquered remnants are carried along within it, whose mere nuances have developed significance within it, etc.…The intimations of higher development among the subordinate animal species…can be understood only after the higher development is already

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known. The bourgeois economy thus supplies the key to the ancient (1973:105). For ‘capital’ or ‘bourgeois’, I submit, read ‘Europe’. Marx’s methodological/epistemological statements have not always successfully resisted historicist readings. There has always remained enough ambiguity in these statements to make possible the emergence of ‘Marxist’ historical narratives. These narratives turn around the theme of ‘historical transition’. Most modern third-world histories are written within problematics posed by this transition narrative of which the overriding (if often implicit) themes are those of development, modernization, capitalism. This tendency can be located in our own work in the Subaltern Studies project (Guha and Spivak, 1988). My book on working-class history struggles with the problem (Chakrabarty, 1989). Sumit Sarkar’s (another colleague in the Subaltern Studies project) Modern India, justifiably regarded as one of the best textbooks on Indian history written primarily for Indian universities, opens with the following sentences: The sixty years or so that lie between the foundation of the Indian National Congress in 1885 and the achievement of independence in August 1947 witnessed perhaps the greatest transition in our country’s long history. A transition, which in many ways remains grievously incomplete, and it is with this central ambiguity that it seems most convenient to begin our survey (1985a:1). What kind of a transition was it that remained ‘grievously incomplete’? Sarkar hints at the possibility of there having been several, by naming three: So many of the aspirations aroused in the course of the national struggle remained unfulfilled—the Gandhian dream of the peasant coming into his own in Ram-rajya [the rule of the legendary and the ideal god-king Ram], as much as the left ideals of social revolution. And as the history of independent India and Pakistan (and Bangladesh) was repeatedly to reveal, even the problems of a complete bourgeois transformation and successful capitalist development were not fully solved by the transfer of power of 1947 (1985a:4). Neither the peasant’s dream of a mythical and just kingdom, nor the left’s ideal of a social(ist) revolution, nor a ‘complete bourgeois transformation’—it is within these three absences, these ‘grievously incomplete’ scenarios that Sarkar locates the story of modern India. The tendency to read Indian history in terms of a lack, an absence or incompleteness that translates into ‘inadequacy’, is obvious in these excerpts. As a trope, however, it is an ancient one, going back to the hoary beginnings

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of colonial rule in India. The British conquered and represented the diversity of ‘Indian’ pasts through a homogenizing narrative of transition from a ‘medieval’ period to ‘modernity’. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, generations of élite Indian nationalists found their subject-positions, as nationalists, within this transitionnarrative that, at various times depending on one’s ideology, hung the tapestry of ‘Indian history’ between the two poles of the homologous sets of oppositions, despotic/constitutional, medieval/modern, feudal/capitalist. Within this narrative shared between imperialist and nationalist imaginations, the ‘Indian’ was always a figure of lack. There was always, in other words, room in this story for characters who embodied, on behalf of the native, the theme of ‘inadequacy’ or ‘failure’. For Rammohun Roy as for Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay, two of India’s most prominent nationalist intellectuals of the nineteenth century, British rule was a necessary period of tutelage that Indians had to undergo in order to prepare precisely for what the British denied but extolled as the end of all history: citizenship and the nation-state. In nationalist versions of this narrative, as Partha Chatterjee has shown, it was the peasants and the workers, the subaltern classes, who were given to bear the cross of ‘inadequacy’, for, according to this version, it was they who needed to be educated out of their ignorance, parochialism or, depending on your preference, false consciousness (Chatterjee, 1986). Even today the Anglo-Indian word ‘communalism’ refers to those who allegedly fail to measure up to the ‘secular’ ideals of citizenship. That the British rule put the practices, institutions and the discourse of bourgeois individualism in place in the Indian soil is undeniable. Early expressions—that is, before the beginnings of nationalism—of this desire to be a ‘legal subject’ make it clear that to Indians in the 1830s and 40s, to be a ‘modern individual’ was to become a ‘European’. Later Indian nationalists, however, abandoned such abject desire to be ‘Europeans’ themselves. Nationalist thought was premised precisely on the assumed universality of the project of becoming individuals, on the assumption that ‘individual rights’ and abstract ‘equality’ were universals that could find a home anywhere in the world, that one could be both an ‘Indian’ and a ‘citizen’ at the same time. We shall soon explore some of the contradictions of this project. Many of the public and private rituals of modern individualism became visible in India in the nineteenth century. One sees this, for instance, in the sudden flourishing in this period of the four basic genres that help express the modern self: the novel, the biography, the autobiography and history.3 Along with these came modern industry, technology, medicine, a quasibourgeois (though colonial) legal system supported by a state that nationalism was to take over and make its own. The transition-narrative that I have been discussing underwrote, and was in turn underpinned by these institutions. To

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think this narrative was to think these institutions at the apex of which sat the modern state,4 and to think the modern or the nation-state was to think a history whose theoretical subject was Europe. Gandhi realized this as early as early as 1909. Referring to the Indian nationalists’ demands for more railways, modern medicine and bourgeois law, he cannily remarked in his book Hind Swaraj that this was to ‘make India English’ or, as he put it, to have ‘English rule without the Englishman’ (1909/63:15). This ‘Europe’ was of course nothing but a piece of fiction told to the colonized by the colonizer in the very process of fabricating colonial domination.5 Gandhi’s critique of this ‘Europe’ is compromised on many points by his nationalism and I do not intend to fetishize his text. But I find his gesture useful in developing the problematic of non-metropolitan histories. I shall now return to the themes of ‘failure’, ‘lack’ and ‘inadequacy’ that so ubiquitously characterize the speaking-subject of ‘Indian’ history. As in the practice of the insurgent peasants of colonial India, the first step in a critical effort must arise from a gesture of inversion (Guha, 1983: chap. 2). Let us begin from where the transition-narrative ends and read ‘plenitude’ and ‘creativity’ where this narrative has made us read ‘lack’ and ‘inadequacy’. According to the fable of their constitution, Indians today are all ‘citizens’. The constitution embraces almost a classically liberal definition of citizenship. If the modern state and the modern individual, the citizen, are but the two inseparable sides of the same phenomenon, as William Connolly argues in his interesting book Political Theory and Modernity (1989), it would appear that the end of history (shades of Fukuyama!) is in sight for us in India. This modern individual, however, whose political/public life is lived in citizenship, is also supposed to have an interiorized ‘private’ self which pours out incessantly in diaries, letters, autobiographies, novels and, of course, in what we say to our analysts. The bourgeois individual is not born until one discovers the pleasures of privacy. But this is a very special kind of ‘private’— it is, in fact, a deferred ‘public’, for this bourgeois private, as Habermas has reminded us, is ‘always already oriented to an audience (Publikum)’ (1989: 49. Indian public life may mimic on paper the bourgeois legal fiction of citizenship—the fiction is usually performed as a farce in India—but what about the bourgeois private and its history? Anyone who has tried to write ‘French’ social history with Indian material would know how impossibly difficult the task is (see Sarkar, 1985b:256–74). It is not that the form of the bourgeois private did not come with European rule. There have been, since the middle of the nineteenth century, Indian novels, diaries, letters and autobiographies, but they seldom yield pictures of an endlessly interiorized subject. Our autobiographies are remarkably ‘public’ (with constructions of public life that are not necessarily modern) when written by men, and tell the story of the extended family when written by women.6 In any case, autobiographies in the confessional mode are notable for their absence. The

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single paragraph (out of 963 pages) that Nirad Chaudhuri spends on describing his experience of his wedding night in the second volume of his celebrated and prize-winning autobiography is as good an example as any other and is worth quoting at some length. I should explain that this was an arranged marriage (Bengal, 1932) and Chaudhuri was anxious lest his wife should not appreciate his newly acquired but unaffordably expensive hobby of buying records of Western classical music. The passage is a telling exercise in the construction of memory, for it is about what Chaudhuri ‘remembers’ and ‘forgets’ of his ‘first night’s experience’. He screens off intimacy with expressions like ‘I do not remember’ or ‘I do not know how’ (not to mention the very Freudian ‘making a clean breast of’), and this self-constructed veil is no doubt a part of the self that speaks: I was terribly uneasy [writes Chaudhuri] at the prospect of meeting as wife a girl who was a complete stranger to me, and when she was brought in …and left standing before me I had nothing to say. I saw only a very shy smile on her face, and timidly she came and sat by my side on the edge of the bed. I do not know how after that both of us drifted to the pillows, to lie down side by side. [Chaudhuri adds in a footnote: ‘Of course, fully dressed. We Hindus…consider both extremes fully clad and fully nude—to be modest, and everything inbetween as grossly immodest. No decent man wants his wife to be an allumeuse.’] Then the first words were exchanged. She took up one of my arms, felt it and said: ‘You are so thin. I shall take good care of you’. I did not thank her, and I do not remember that beyond noting the words I even felt touched. The horrible suspense about European music had reawakened in my mind, and I decided to make a clean breast of it at once and look the sacrifice, if it was called for, straight in the face and begin romance on such terms as were offered to me. I asked her timidly after a while: ‘Have you listened to any European music?’ She shook her head to say ‘No’. Nonetheless, I took another chance and this time asked: ‘Have you heard the name of a man called Beethoven?’ She nodded and signified ‘Yes’. I was reassured, but not wholly satisfied. So I asked yet again: ‘Can you spell the name?’ She said slowly: ‘B, E, E, T, H, O, V, E, N.’ I felt encouraged…and [we] dozed off (1987:350–1). The desire to be ‘modern’ screams out of every sentence in the two volumes of Chaudhuri’s autobiography. His legendary name now stands for the cultural history of Indo-British encounter. Yet in the 1,500 odd pages that he has written in English about his lif e, this is the only passage where the narrative of Chaudhuri’s participation in public life and literary circles is interrupted to make room for something approaching the intimate. How do we read this text, this self-making of an Indian male who was second to no one in his ardour for the public life of the citizen, yet who seldom, if ever, reproduced in

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writing the other side of the modern citizen, the interiorized private self unceasingly reaching out for an audience? Public without private? Yet another instance of the ‘completeness’ of bourgeois transformation in India? These questions are themselves prompted by the transition-narrative which in turn situates the modern individual at the very end of history. I do not wish to confer on Chaudhuri’s autobiography a representativeness it may not have. Women’s writings, as I have already said, are different, and scholars have just begun to explore the world of autobiographies in Indian history. But if one result of European imperialism in India was to introduce the modern state and the idea of the nation with their attendant discourse of ‘citizenship’ which, by the very idea of ‘the citizen’s rights’ (i.e., ‘the rule of law’), splits the figure of the modern individual into ‘public’ and ‘private’ parts of the self (as the young Marx once pointed out in his ‘On the Jewish Question’), these themes have existed—in contestation, alliance and miscegenation—with other narratives of the self and community that do not look to the state/citizen bind as the ultimate construction of sociality (see Marx, 1975:215–52). This as such will not be disputed but my point goes further. It is that these other constructions of self and community, while documentable in themselves, will never enjoy the privilege of providing the meta-narratives or teleologies (assuming that there cannot be a narrative without at least an implicit teleology) of our histories. Partly because these narratives often themselves bespeak an antihistorical consciousness, that is, they entail subject-positions and configurations of memory that challenge and undermine the subject that speaks in the name of history. ‘History’ is precisely the site where the struggle goes on to appropriate, on behalf of the modern (my hyper-real Europe), these other collocations of memory. To illustrate these propositions, I will now discuss a fragment of this contested history in which the modern private and the modern individual were embroiled in colonial India.7 What I present here are the outlines, so to speak, of a chapter in the history of bourgeois domesticity in colonial Bengal. The material—in the main texts produced in Bengali between 1850 and 1920 for teaching women that very Victorian subject, ‘domestic science’—relates to the Bengali Hindu middle class, the bhadralok or ‘respectable people’. British rule instituted into Indian life the trichotomous ideational division on which modern political structures rest, e.g., the state, civil society and the (bourgeois) family. It was therefore not surprising that ideas relating to bourgeois domesticity, privacy and individuality should come to India via British rule. What I want to highlight here, however, through the example of the bhadralok, are certain cultural operations by which the ‘Indians’ challenged and modified these received ideas in such a way as to put in question two fundamental tenets underlying the idea of ‘modernity’—the nuclear family based on companionate marriage and the secular, historical construction of time.

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As Meredith Borthwick (1984, Ghulam Murshid (1983) and other scholars have shown, the eighteenth-century European idea of ‘civilization’ culminated, in early nineteenth-century India, in a full-blown imperialist critique of Indian/Hindu domestic life which was now held to be inferior to what became mid-Victorian ideals of bourgeois domesticity.8 ‘The condition of women’ question in nineteenth-century India was part of that critique as were the ideas of the ‘modern’ individual, ‘freedom’, ‘equality’ and ‘rights’. In passages remarkable for their combination of egalitarianism and orientalism, James Mill’s The History of British India (1837) joined together the thematic of the family/nation and a teleology of ‘freedom’: The condition of women is one of the most remarkable circumstances in the manners of nations…The history of uncultivated nations uniformly represents the women as in a state of abject slavery, from which they slowly emerge as civilisation advances…As society refines upon its enjoyments,…the condition of the weaker sex is gradually improved, till they associate on equal terms with the men, and occupy the place of voluntary and useful coadjutors. A state of dependence more strict and humiliating than that which is ordained for the weaker sex among the Hindus cannot be easily conceived (Mill, 1837:309–10). As is well known, the Indian middle classes generally felt answerable to this charge. From the early nineteenth-century onwards a movement developed in Bengal (and other regions) to reform ‘women’s conditions’ and to give them formal education. Much of this discourse on women’s education was emancipationist in that it spoke the language of ‘freedom’, ‘equality’ and ‘awakening’, and was strongly influenced by Ruskinian ideals and idealization of bourgeois domesticity (Borthwick, 1984). If one looks on this history as part of the history of the modern individual in India, an interesting feature emerges. It is that in this literature on women’s education certain terms, after all, were much more vigorously debated than others. There was, for example, a degree of consensus over the desirability of domestic ‘discipline’ and ‘hygiene’ as practices reflective of a state of modernity, but the word ‘freedom’, yet another important term in the rhetoric of the modern, hardly ever acted as the register of such a social consensus. It was a passionately disputed word and we would be wrong to assume that the passions reflected a simple and straightforward battle of the sexes. The word was assimilated to the nationalist need to construct cultural boundaries that supposedly separated the ‘European’ from the ‘Indian’. The dispute over the word was thus central to the discursive strategies through which a subjectposition was created enabling the ‘Indian’ to speak. It is this subject-position that I want to discuss here in some detail. What the Bengali literature on women’s education played out was a battle between a nationalist construction of a cultural norm of the patriarchal,

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patrilocal, patrilineal, extended family and the ideal of the patriarchal, bourgeois nuclear family that was implicit in the European/imperialist/ universalist discourse on the ‘freedoms’ of individualism, citizenship and civil society.9 The themes of ‘discipline’ and ‘order’ were critical in shaping nationalist imaginings of aesthetics and power. ‘Discipline’ was seen as the key to the power of the colonial (i.e., modern) state but it required certain procedures for redefining the self. The British were powerful, it was argued, because they were disciplined, orderly and punctual in every detail of their lives, and this was made possible by the education of ‘their’ women who brought the virtues of discipline into the home. The ‘Indian’ home, a colonial construct, now fared badly in nationalist writings on modern domesticity. To quote a Bengali text on women’s education from 1877: The house of any civilized European is like the abode of gods. Every household object is clean, set in its proper place and decorated; nothing seems unclean or smells foul…it is as if [the goddess of] order [srinkhala: order, discipline; srinkhal: chains] had become manifest to please the [human] eye. In the middle of the room would be a covered table with a bouquet of flowers on it, while around it would be [a few] chairs nicely arranged [with] everything sparkling clean. But enter a house in our country and you would feel as if you had been transported there by your destiny to make you atone for all the sins of your life. [A mass of] cowdung torturing the senses,…dust in the air, a growing heap of ashes, flies buzzing around,…a little boy urinating into the ground and putting the mess back into his mouth…the whole place is dominated by a stench that seems to be running free…There is no order anywhere, the household objects are so unclean that they only evoke disgust (Anon, 1877:28–9). This self-division of the colonial subject, the double movement of recognition by which it both knows its ‘present’ as the site of disorder and yet moves away from this space in desiring a discipline that can only exist in an imagined but ‘historical’ future, is a rehearsal, in the context of the discussion of the bourgeois domestic in colonial India, of the transition-narrative we have encountered before. A historical construction of temporality (medieval/ modern, separated by historical time), in other words, is precisely the axis along which the colonial subject splits itself. Or to put it differently, this split is what is history; writing history is performing this split over and over again. The desire for order and discipline in the domestic sphere thus may be seen as having been a correlate of the nationalist, modernizing desire f or a similar discipline in the public sphere, that is for a rule of law enforced by the state. It is beyond the scope of this paper to pursue this point further, but the connection between personal discipline and discipline in public life was to reveal itself in what the nationalists wrote about domestic hygiene and public

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health. The connection is recognizably modernist and it is what the Indian modern shared with the European modern.10 What I want to attend to, however, are the differences between the two. And this is where I turn to the other important aspect of the European modern, the rhetoric of ‘freedom’ and ‘equality’. The argument about ‘freedom’—in the texts under discussion—was waged around the question of the Victorian ideals of the companionate marriage, that is, over the question as to whether or not the wife should also be a friend to the husband. Nothing threatened the ideal of the Bengali/ Indian extended family (or the exalted position of the mother-in-law within the structure) more than this idea wrapped up in notions of bourgeois privacy, that the wife was also to be a friend or, to put it differently, that the woman was now to be a modern individual. I must mention here that the modern individual, who asserts his/her individuality over the claims of the joint or extended family, almost always appears in nineteenth-and early twentieth-century Bengali literature as an embattled figure, often the subject of ridicule and scorn in the same Bengali fiction and essays that otherwise extolled the virtues of discipline and scientific rationality in personal and public lives. This irony had many expressions. The most well-known Bengali fictional character who represents this moral censure of modern individuality is Nimchand Datta in Dinabandhu Mitra’s play Sadhabar Ekadashi (1866). Nimchand, who is English-educated, quotes Shakespeare, Milton or Locke at the slightest opportunity and who uses this education arrogantly to ignore his duties towards his extended family, finds his nemesis in alcohol and debauchery. This metonymic relationship between the love of ‘modern’/ English education (which stood for the romantic individual in nineteenth-century Bengal) and the slippery path of alcohol is suggested in the play by a conversation between Nimchand and a Bengali official of the colonial bureaucracy, a Deputy Magistrate. Nimchand’s supercilious braggadocio about his command of the English language quickly and inevitably runs to the subject of drinks (synonymous, in middle-class Bengali culture of the period, with absolute decadence): I read English, write English, speechify in English, think in English, dream in English—mind you, it’s no child’s play—now tell me, my good fellow, what would you like to drink?—Claret for ladies, sherry for men and brandy for heroes (Mitra, 1981:138). A similar connection between the modern, ‘free’, individual and selfishness was made in the literature on women’s education. The construction was undisguisedly nationalist (and patriarchal). ‘Freedom’ was used to mark a difference between what was ‘Indian’ and what was ‘European/English’. The ultra-free woman acted like a memsahib (European woman), selfish and shameless. As Kundamala Devi, a woman writing for a women’s magazine

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Bamabodhini Patrika, said in 1870: ‘Oh dear ones! If you have acquired real knowledge, then give no place in your heart to memsahib-like behaviour. This is not becoming in a Bengali housewife (Borthwick, 1984:105). The idea of ‘true modesty’ was mobilized to build up this picture of the ‘really’ Bengali woman.11 Writing in 1920, Indira Devi dedicated her Narir ukti [A Woman Speaks]—interestingly enough, a defence of modern Bengali womanhood against criticisms by (predominantly) male writers—to generations of ideal Bengali women whom she thus described: ‘unaffected by nature, of pleasant speech, untiring in their service [to others], oblivious of their own pleasures, [while] moved easily by the suffering of others, and capable of being content with very little’ (Devi, 1920: dedication page). This model of the ‘modern’ Bengali/Indian woman—educated enough to appreciate the modern regulations of the body and the state but yet ‘modest’ enough to be unselfassertive and unselfish—was tied to the debates on ‘freedom’. ‘Freedom’ in the West, several authors argued, meant jathechhachar, to do as one pleased, the right to self-indulgence. In India, it was said, ‘freedom’ meant freedom from the ego, the capacity to serve and obey voluntarily. Notice how the terms ‘freedom’ and ‘slavery’ have changed positions in the following quote: To be able to subordinate oneself to others and to dharma [duty/moral order/proper action]…to free the soul from the slavery of the senses, are the first tasks of human freedom…. That is why in Indian families boys and girls are subordinate to the parents, wife to the husband and to the parents-in-law, the discipline to the guru, the student to the teacher,… the king to dharma,…the people to the king, [and one’s] dignity and prestige to [that of] the community [samaj] (Bandyopadhyaya, 1887: 30–1).12 There was an ironical twist to this theorizing that needs to be noted. Quite clearly, this theory of ‘freedom-in-obedience’ did not apply to the domestic servants who were sometimes mentioned in this literature as examples of the ‘truly’ unfree, the nationalist point being that (European) observers commenting on the unfree status of Indian women often missed (so some nationalists argued) this crucial distinction between the housewife and the domestic. Obviously, the servants were not yet included in the India of the nationalist imagination. Thus the Bengali discourse on modern domesticity in a colonial period when the rise of a civil society and a quasi-modern state had already inserted the modern questions of ‘public’ and ‘private’ into middle-class Bengali lives. The received bourgeois ideas about domesticity and connections between the domestic and the national were modified here in two significant ways. One strategy, as I have sought to demonstrate, was to contrapose the cultural norm of the patriarchal extended family to the bourgeois patriarchal

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ideals of the companionate marriage, to oppose the new patriarchy with redefined versions of the old one(s). Thus was fought the idea of the modern private. The other strategy, equally significant, was to mobilize on behalf of the extended family, forms and figurations of collective memory that challenged, albeit ambiguously, the seemingly absolute separation of ‘sacred’ and ‘secular’ time on which the very modern (‘European’) idea of history was/is based (Burke, 1969). The figure of the ‘truly educated’, ‘truly modest’ and ‘truly Indian’ woman is invested, in this discussion of women’s education, with a sacred authority by subordinating the question of domestic life to religious ideas of female auspiciousness that joined the heavenly with the mundane in a conceptualization of time which could be only antihistorical. The truly modern housewife, it was said, would be so auspicious as to mark the eternal return of the cosmic principle embodied in the goddess Lakshmi, the goddess of domestic well-being by whose grace the extended family (and clan, and hence by extending the sentiment, the nation, Bharatlakshmi) lived and prospered. Thus we read in a contemporary pamphlet: Women are the Lakshmis of the community. If they undertake to improve themselves in the sphere of dharma and knowledge…there will be an automatic improvement in [the quality of] social life (Bikshuk, 1876:77). Lakshmi, regarded as the Hindu god Vishnu’s wife by c. AD 400, has for long been held up in popular Hinduism, and in the everyday pantheism of Hindu families, as the model of the Hindu wife, united in complete harmony with her husband (and his family) through wilful submission, loyalty, devotion and chastity.13 When women did not follow her ideals, it was said, the (extended) family and the family line were destroyed by the spirit of Alakshmi (notLakshmi), the dark and malevolent reverse of the Lakshmi-principle. While women’s education and the idea of discipline as such were seldom opposed in this discourse regarding the modern individual in colonial Bengal, the line was drawn at the point where modernity and the demand for bourgeois privacy threatened the power and the pleasures of the extended family. There is no question that the speaking-subject here is nationalist and patriarchal, employing the clichéd Orientalist categories, ‘the East’ and ‘the West’.14 However, of importance to us are the two denials on which this particular moment of subjectivity rests: the denial, or at least contestation, of the bourgeois private, and, equally important, the denial of historical time by making the family a site where the sacred and the secular blended in perpetual reenactment of a principle that was heavenly and divine. The cultural space the antihistorical invoked was by no means harmonious or nonconflictual, though nationalist thought of necessity tried to portray it to be so. The antihistorical norms of the patriarchal extended family, for example, could only have had a contested existence, contested both by

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women’s struggles and by those of the subaltern classes. But these struggles did not necessarily follow any lines that would allow us to construct emancipatory narratives by putting the ‘patriarchals’ clearly on one side and the ‘liberals’ on the other. The history of modern ‘Indian’ individuality is caught up in too many contradictions to lend itself to such a treatment. I do not have the space here to develop the point, so I will make do with one example. It comes from the autobiography of Ramabai Ranade, the wife of the famous nineteenth-century social reformer from the Bombay Presidency, M.G.Ranade. Ramabai Ranade’s struggle for self-respect was in part against the ‘old’ patriarchal order of the extended family and for the ‘new’ patriarchy of companionate marriage which her reform-minded husband saw as the most civilized form of the conjugal bond. In pursuit of this ideal, Ramabai began to share her husband’s commitment to public life and would often take part (in the 1880s) in public gatherings and deliberations of male and female social reformers. As she herself says: ‘It was at these meetings that I learnt what a meeting was and how one should conduct oneself at one’ (Ranade, 1963:77). Interestingly, however, one of the chief sources of opposition to Ramabai’s efforts were (apart from men) the other women in the family. There is of course no doubt that they, her mother-in-law and her husband’s sisters, spoke for the old patriarchal extended family. But it is quite instructive to listen to their voices (as they come across through Ramabai’s text) for they also spoke for their own sense of self-respect and their own forms of struggle against men: You should not really go to these meetings [they said to Ramabai]…. Even if the men want you to do these things, you should ignore them. You need not say no: but after all, you need not do it. They will then give up, out of sheer boredom…you are outdoing even the European women (84–5). These voices, combining the contradictory themes of nationalism, of patriarchal clan-based ideology, of women’s struggles against men, and opposed as the same time to friendship between husbands and wives, remind us of the deep ambivalences that marked the trajectory of the modern private and bourgeois individuality in colonial India. Yet historians manage, by manoeuvres reminiscent of the old ‘dialectical’ card-trick called ‘negation of negation’, to deny a subject-position to this voice of ambivalence. The evidence of what I have called ‘the denial of the bourgeois private and of the historical subject’ is acknowledged but subordinated in their accounts to the supposedly higher purpose of making Indian history look like yet another episode in the universal and (in their view, the ultimately victorious) march of citizenship, of the nation-state, of themes of human emancipation spelt out in the course of the European Enlightenment and after. It is the figure of the citizen that speaks through these histories. And so long as that happens, my

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hyper-real Europe will continually return to dominate the stories we tell. ‘The modern’ will then continue to be understood, as Meaghan Morris has so aptly put it in discussing her own Australian context, ‘as a known history, something which has already happened elsewhere, and which is to be reproduced, mechanically or otherwise, with a local content.’ This can only leave us with a task of reproducing what Morris calls ‘the project of positive unoriginality’ (1990:10). Yet the ‘originality’—I concede that this is a bad term—the idioms through which struggles have been conducted in the Indian subcontinent, has often been in the sphere of the nonmodern. One does not have to subscribe to the ideology of clannish patriarchy, for instance, to acknowledge that the metaphor of the sanctified and patriarchal extended family was one of the most important elements in the cultural politics of Indian nationalism. In the struggle against British rule, it was frequently the use of this idiom—in songs, poetry and other forms of nationalist mobilizations—that allowed ‘Indians’ to fabricate a sense of community and to retrieve for themselves a subjectposition from which to address the British. Colonial Indian history is replete with instances where Indians arrogated subjecthood to themselves precisely by mobilizing, within the context of ‘modern’ institutions and sometimes on behalf of the modernizing project of nationalism, devices of collective memory that were both antihistorical and antimodern.15 This is not to deny the capacity of ‘Indians’ to act as subjects endowed with what we in the universities would recognize as ‘a sense of history’ (what Peter Burke (1969) calls ‘the renaissance sense of the past’) but to insist at the same time that there were also contrary trends, that in the multifarious struggles that took place in colonial India, antihistorical constructions of the past often provided very powerful forms of collective memory (Burke, 1969; Guha, 1983). There is then this double bind through which the subject of ‘Indian’ history articulates itself. On the one hand, it is both the subject and the object of modernity, because it stands for an assumed unity called the ‘Indian people’ that is always split into two—a modernizing élite and a yet-to-be modernized peasantry. As such a split subject, however, it speaks from within a metanarrative that celebrates the nation-state; and of this meta-narrative the theoretical subject can only be a hyper-real ‘Europe’, a ‘Europe’ constructed by the tales that both imperialism and nationalism have told the colonized. The mode of self-representation that the ‘Indian’ can adopt here is what Homi Bhabha (1987, also 1990) has justly called ‘mimetic’. Indian history, even in the most dedicated socialist or nationalist hands, remains a mimicry of a certain ‘modern’ subject of ‘European’ history and is bound to represent a sad figure of lack and failure. The transition-narrative will always remain ‘grievously incomplete’. On the other hand, manoeuvres are made within the space of the mimetic— and therefore within the project called ‘Indian’ history—to represent the

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‘difference’ and the ‘originality’ of the ‘Indian’, and it is in this cause that the antihistorical devices of memory and the antihistorical ‘histories’ of the subaltern classes are appropriated. Thus peasant/worker constructions of ‘mythical’ kingdoms and ‘mythical’ pasts/futures find a place in texts designated ‘Indian’ history precisely through a procedure that subordinates these narratives to the rules of evidence and to the secular, linear calendar that the writing of ‘history’ must follow. The antihistorical, antimodern subject, therefore, cannot speak itself as ‘theory’ within the knowledge-procedures of the university even when these knowledge-procedures acknowledge and ‘document’ its existence. Much like Spivak’s (1988) ‘subaltern’ (or the anthropologist’s peasant who can only have a quoted existence in a larger statement that belongs to the anthropologists alone), this subject can only be spoken for and spoken of by the transition-narrative which will always ultimately privilege the modern (i.e., ‘Europe’) (see also Spivak, 1990). So long as one operates within the discourse of ‘history’ produced at the institutional site of the university, it is not possible simply to walk out of the deep collusion between ‘history’ and the modernizing narrative(s) of citizenship, bourgeois public and private and the nation-state. ‘History’ as a knowledge-system is firmly embedded in institutional practices that invoke the nation-state at every step—witness the organization and politics of teaching, recruitment, promotions and publication in History departments, politics that survive the occasional brave and heroic attempts by individual historians to liberate ‘history’ from the meta-narrative of the nation-state. One only has to ask, for instance: Why is history a compulsory part of education of the modern person in all countries today including those that did quite comfortably without it until as late as the eighteenth century? Why should children all over the world today have to come to terms with a subject called ‘history’ when we know that this compulsion is neither natural nor ancient?16 It does not take much imagination to see that the reason for this lies in what European imperialism and third-world nationalisms have achieved together: universalize the nation-state as the most desirable form of political community. Nation-states have the capacity to enforce their truth-games, and universities, their critical distance notwithstanding, are part of the battery of institutions complicit in this process. ‘Economics’ and ‘history’ are the knowledge-forms that correspond to the two major institutions that the rise (and later universalization) of the bourgeois order has given to the world—the capitalist mode of production and the nation-state (‘history’ speaking to the figure of the citizen).17 A critical historian has no choice but to negotiate this knowledge. S/he therefore needs to understand the state on its own terms, i.e., in terms of its self-justificatory narratives of citizenship and modernity. Since these themes will always take us back to the universalist propositions of ‘modern’ (European) political philosophy, a third-world historian is condemned to knowing ‘Europe’ as the original home of the ‘modern’ whereas the ‘European’ historian does not share a comparable predicament

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with regard to the pasts of the majority of the humankind. Thus the everyday subalternity of non-Western histories with which I began this paper. Yet the understanding that ‘we’ all do ‘European’ history with our different and often non-European archives, opens up the possibility of a politics and project of alliance between the dominant metropolitan histories and the subaltern peripheral pasts. Let us call this the project of provincializing ‘Europe’, the ‘Europe’ that modern imperialism and (third-world) nationalism have, by their collaborative venture and violence, made universal. Philosophically, this project must ground itself in a radical critique and transcendence of liberalism (i.e., of the bureaucratic constructions of citizenship, modern state, and bourgeois privacy that classical political philosophy has produced), a ground that late Marx shares with certain moments in both poststructuralist thought and feminist philosophy. In particular, I am emboldened by Carole Pateman’s courageous declaration—in her remarkable book The Sexual Contract—that the very conception of the modern individual belongs to patriarchal categories of thought (1988:184). The project of ‘provincializing Europe’ refers to a history which does not yet exist; I can therefore only speak of it in a programmatic manner. To forestall misunderstanding, however, I must spell out what it is not while outlining what it could be. To begin with, it does not call for a simplistic, out-of-hand rejection of modernity, liberal values, universals, science, reason, grand narratives, totalizing explanations, etc. Jameson has recently reminded us that the easy equation often made between ‘a philosophical conception of totality’ and ‘a political practice of totalitarianism’ is ‘baleful’ (1988:354). The project of ‘provincializing Europe’ therefore cannot be a project of ‘cultural relativism’. It cannot originate from the stance that the reason/ science/universals that help define Europe as the modern are simply ‘culturespecific’ and therefore only belong to the European cultures. For the point is not that Enlightenment rationalism is always unreasonable in itself but rather a matter of documenting how—through what historical process—its ‘reason’, which was not always self-evident to everyone, has been made to look ‘obvious’ far beyond the ground where it originated. If a language, as has been said, is but a dialect backed up by an army, the same could be said of the narratives of ‘modernity’ that, almost universally today, point to a certain ‘Europe’ as the primary habits of the modern. This Europe, like ‘the West’, is demonstrably an imaginary entity but the demonstration as such does not lesson its appeal or power. The project of ‘provincializing Europe’ has to include certain other additional moves: (a) the recognition that Europe’s acquisition of the adjective ‘modern’ for itself is a piece of global history of which an integral part is the story of European imperialism, and (b) the understanding that this equating of a certain version of Europe with ‘modernity’ is not the work of Europeans alone; third-world nationalisms, as modernizing ideologies par excellence, have been equal

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partners in the process. I do not mean to overlook the anti-imperial moments in the careers of these nationalisms; I only underscore the point that the project of ‘provincializing Europe’ cannot be a nationalist, nativist or an atavistic project. In unravelling the necessary entanglement of history—a disciplined and institutionally regulated form of collective memory—with the grand narratives of ‘rights’, ‘citizenship’, the nation-state, ‘public’ and ‘private’ spheres, one cannot but problematize ‘India’ at the same time as one dismantles ‘Europe’. The idea is to write into the history of modernity the ambivalences, contradictions, the use of force, and the tragedies and the ironies that attend it. That the rhetoric and the claims of (bourgeois) equality, citizen’s rights, of self-determination through a sovereign nation-state have in many circumstances empowered marginal social groups in their struggles is undeniable. What effectively is played down, however, in histories that either implicitly celebrate the advent of the modern state and the idea of citizenship is the repression and violence that are as instrumental in the victory of the modern as is the persuasive power of its rhetorical strategies. Nowhere is this irony—the undemocratic foundations of ‘democracy’—more visible than in the history of modern medicine, public health and personal hygiene the discourses of which have been central in locating the body of the modern at the intersection of the public and the private (as defined by, and subject to negotiations with, the state). The triumph of this discourse, however, has always been dependent on the mobilization, on its behalf, of effective means of physical coercion. I say ‘always’ because this coercion is both originary/ foundational (i.e., historic) as well as pandemic and quotidian. Of foundational violence, David Arnold (forthcoming) gives a good example in a recent essay on the history of the prison in India. The coercion of the colonial prison, Arnold shows, was integral to some of the earliest and pioneering research on the medical, dietary and demographic statistics of India, for the prison was where Indian bodies were accessible to modernizing investigators.18 Of the coercion that continues in the names of the nation and modernity, a recent example comes from the Indian campaign to eradicate smallpox in the 1970s. Two American doctors (one of them presumably of ‘Indian’ origin) who participated in the process thus describe their operations in a village of the Ho tribe in the Indian state of Bihar: In the middle of gentle Indian night, an intruder burst through the bamboo door of the simple adobe hut. He was a government vaccinator, under orders to break resistance against smallpox vaccination. Lakshmi Singh awoke screaming and scrambled to hide herself. Her husband leaped out of bed, grabbed an axe, and chased the intruder into the courtyard. Outside a squad of doctors and policemen quickly overpowered Mohan Singh. The instant he was pinned to the ground, a second vaccinator jabbed smallpox vaccine into his arm. Mohan Singh,

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a wiry 40-year-old leader of the Ho tribe, squirmed away from the needle, causing the vaccination site to bleed. The government team held him until they had injected enough vaccine…While the two policemen rebuffed him, the rest of the team overpowered the entire f amily vaccinated each in turn. Lakshmi Singh bit deep into one doctor’s hand, but to no avail (Brilliant with Brilliant, 1978:3).19 There is no escaping the idealism that accompanies this violence. The subtitle of the article in question unselfconsciously reproduces both the military and the do-gooding instincts of the enterprise. It reads: ‘How an army of samaritans drove smallpox from the earth’. Histories that aim to displace a hyper-real Europe from the centre towards which all historical imagination currently gravitates, will have to seek out relentlessly this connection between violence and idealism that lies at the heart of the process by which the narratives of citizenship and modernity come to find a natural home in ‘history’. The task, as I see it, will be to wrestle ideas that legitimize the modern state and its attendant institutions, in order to return to political philosophy—in the same way as suspect coins are returned to their owners in an Indian bazaar— its categories whose global currency can no longer be taken for granted.20 And, finally—since ‘Europe’ cannot after all be provincialized within the institutional site of the university whose knowledge-protocols will always take us back to the terrain where all contours follow that of my hyper-real Europe—the project of provincializing Europe must realize within itself its own impossibility. It therefore looks to a history that embodies this politics of despair. It will have been clear by now that this is not a call for cultural relativism or for atavistic, nativist histories. Nor is this a programme for a simple rejection of modernity which would be, in many situations, politically suicidal. I ask for a history that deliberately makes visible, within the very structure of its narrative forms, its own repressive strategies and practices, the part it plays in collusion with the narratives of citizenships in assimilating to the projects of the modern state all other possibilities of human solidarity. The politics of despair will require of such history that it lays bare to its readers such reasons why such a predicament is necessarily inescapable. A history that will attempt the impossible: look toward its own death by tracing that which resists and escapes the best human effort at translation across cultural and other semiotic systems, so that the world may once again be imagined as radically heterogeneous. This, as I have said, is impossible within the knowledge-protocols of academic history, for the globality of the academia is not independent of the globality that the European modern has created. To attempt to provincialize this ‘Europe’ is to see the modern as inevitably contested, to write over the given and privileged narratives of citizenship other narratives of human connections that draw sustenance from dreamt-up pasts and futures where collectivities are defined neither by the rituals of

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citizenship nor by the nightmare of ‘tradition’ that ‘modernity’ creates. There are of course no (infra)structural sites where such dreams could lodge themselves. Yet they will recur so long as the themes of citizenship and the nation-state dominate our narratives of historical transition, for these dreams are what the modern represses in order to be. Notes 1 A larger version of this article was published in Representations 37, 1992. The author wishes to express his gratitude to Ien Ang and John Hartley f or their kind and generous assistance with editing this piece. 2 See the discussion in Marx (1973:469–512), and Marx (1971:593–613). 3 I am not making the claim that all of these genres necessarily emerge with bourgeois individualism. See Davis (1988 and 1986). See also Lejeune (1989:163– 84). 4 See Chatterjee’s (1986) chapter on Nehru. 5 See this discussion in Viwanathan (1990:128–41 passim). 6 For reasons of space, I shall leave this claim here unsubstantiated, although I hope to have an opportunity to discuss it in detail elsewhere. I should qualify the statement by mentioning that it in the main refers to autobiographies published between 1850 and 1910. Once women join the public sphere in the twentieth century, their self-fashioning takes on different dimensions. 7 For a more detailed treatment of what follows, see Chakrabarty (forthcoming). 8 On the history of the word ‘civilization’, see Febvre (1973). I owe this reference to Peter Sahlins. 9 The classic text where this assumption has been worked up into philosophy is of course Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (1967:110–22). See also Hodge (1987), During (forthcoming), Landes (1988), and Ryan (1990). 10 I develop this argument further in Chakrabarty (1991). 11 I discuss this in more detail in Chakrabarty (forthcoming). 12 For a genealogy of the terms ‘slavery’ and ‘freedom’ as used in the colonial discourse of British India, see Prakash (1990a). 13 Kinsley (1988:19–31); Basu (1873:60); Bhattacharya (1951:469–71); Dhal (1978). The expression ‘everyday pantheism’ was suggested to me by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (personal communication). 14 See Chatterjee’s (1986) chapter on Bankim. 15 See Subaltern Studies, Vols 1–7, Delhi, 1982–91; and Nandy (1983). 16 On the close connection between imperialist ideologies and the teaching of history in colonial India, see Guha (1988). 17 Without in any way implicating them in the entirety of this argument, I may mention that there are parallels here between my statement and what Gyan Prakash (1990b) and Nicholas Dirks (1990) have argued elsewhere. 18 I have discussed some of these issues in a Bengali article (Chakrabarty, 1988). 19 I owe this reference to Paul Greenough.

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20 For an interesting and revisionist reading of Hegel in this regard, see the exchange between Charles Taylor and Partha Chatterjee in Public Culture, 3(1), 1990. My book (Chakrabarty, 1989) attempts a small beginning in this direction.

References Anon., (1877) Streesiksha vol. 1, Calcutta [Bengali]. Arnold, David (forthcoming) ‘The colonial prison: power, knowledge, and penology in nineteenth-century India’, in Arnold, D. and Hardiman, D. (forthcoming) editors, Subaltern Studies, Vol. 8. Bandyopadhyaya, Deenanath (1887) Nanabishayak prabandha, Calcutta. Basu, Manomohan (1873) Hindu acar byabahar, Calcutta [Bengali]. Bhabha, Homi (1987) ‘Of mimicry and man: the ambivalence of colonial discourse’, in Michelson, Annette, et al., editors, October: The First Decade 1976–1986, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 317–26. ——(1990) editor, Nation and Narration, London: Routledge. Bhattacharya (1951) ‘Minor religious sects’, in Majumdar, R.C. (ed.) The History and Culture of the Indian People: The Age of Imperial Unity, vol. 2, Bombay: Bharatiya Vidyabhavan, 469–71. Bikshuk (Chandrasekhar Sen) (1876) Ki holo!, Calcutta. Borthwick, Meredith (1984) The Changing Roles of Women in Bengal 1849–1905, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Brilliant, Lawrence, with Brilliant, Girija (1978) ‘Death for a killer disease’, Quest, (May/ June). Burke, Peter (1969) The Renaissance Sense of the Past, London: Edward Arnold. Chakrabarty, Dipesh (1988) ‘Sarir, samaj o rashtra—oupanibeshik bharate mahamari o janasangskriti’, Anustup, (annual no.) [Bengali]. ——(1989) Rethinking Working-Class History: Bengal 1890–1940, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. ——(1991) ‘Open space/public place: garbage, modernity and India’, South Asia, 14(1), 15–32. ——(forthcoming) ‘Colonial rule and the domestic order’, in Arnold and Hardiman, Vol. 8. Chatterjee, Partha (1986) National Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse?, London: Zed Press. Chaudhuri, Nirad C. (1987) Thy Hand. Great Anarch! India 1921–1952, London. Connolly, William E. (1989) Political Theory and Modernity, Oxford: Blackwell. Davis, Natalie Zemon (1986) ‘Boundaries and sense of self in sixteenth-century France’, in Heller, Thomas C. et al., editors, Reconstructing Individualism: Autonomy, Individuality, and the Self in Western Thought, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 53–63. ——(1988) ‘Fame and secrecy: Leon Modena’s Life as an early modern autobiography’, History and Theory, 27, 103–118. Devi, Indira (1920) Narir ukti, Calcutta [Bengali]. Dhal, Upendranath (1978) Goddess Lakshmi: Origin and Development, Delhi. Dirks, Nicholas B. (1990) ‘History as a sign of the modern’, Public Culture, 2(2), 25–32.

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During, Simon (forthcoming) ‘Rousseau’s heirs: primitivism, romance and other relations between the modern and the non-modern’. Febvre, Lucien (1973) ‘Civilization: evolution of a word and a group of ideas’, in Burke, Peter, editor, A New Kind of History: From the Writings of Febvre, trans. K. Folca, London. Gandhi, M.K. (1909/63) Hind Swaraj, in Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, Vol. 10, Ahmedabad: Navjan Publishing Trust. Guha, Ranajit (1983) Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India, New Delhi: Oxford University Press. ——(1988) An Indian Historiography of India: A Nineteenth-Century Agenda and Its Implications, Calcutta: K.P. Bagchi. Guha, Ranajit and Spivak, Gayatry Chakravorty (1988) editors, Selected Subaltern Studies, New York: Oxford University Press. Habermas, Jurgen (1989) The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, Cambridge, MA; MIT Press. Hegel, Friedrich (1967) Philosophy of Right, trans. T.M.Knox, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hodge, Joanna (1987) ‘Women and the Hegelian state’, in Kennedy, Ellen and Mendus, Susan, editors, Women in Western Philosophy, Brighton, Sussex, 127–158. Jameson, Fredric (1988) ‘Cognitive mapping’, in Nelson and Grossberg (1988). Kinsley, David (1988) Hindu Goddesses: Visions of the Divine Feminine in the Hindu Religious Tradition, Berkeley: University of California Press. Landes, Joan B. (1988) Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Lejeune, Philippe (1989) On Autobiography, trans. Katherine Leary, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Marx, Karl (1971) Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. 3, Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House. ——(1973) Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, trans. Martin Nicholas, Harmondsworth: Penguin. ——(1975) ‘On the Jewish Question’, in his Early Writings, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Mill, James (1837) The History of British India, Vol. 1, Wilson, H.H., editor, London: J.Madden. Mitra, Dinabandhu (1981) Dinabandhu racanabali, Gupta, Kshetra, editor, Calcutta: Sahitya Sangsad [Bengali]. Morris, Meaghan (1990) ‘Metamorphoses at Sydney Tower’, New Formations, 11 (Summer). Murshid, Ghulam (1983) Reluctant Debutante: Response of Bengali Women to Modernization, 1849–1905, Rajshahi: Rajshahi University. Nandy, Ashis (1983) The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self Under Colonialism, Delhi: Oxford University Press. Nelson, Cary and Grossberg, Lawrence (1988) editors, Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Pateman, Carole (1988) The Sexual Contract, Stanford: Standford University Press. Prakash, Gyan (1990a) Bonded Histories: Genealogies of Labour Servitude in Colonial India, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ——(1990b) ‘Writing postorientalist histories of the Third World: perspective from Indian historiography’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 32(2), 383–408.

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Ranade, Ramabai (1963) Ranade: His Wife’s Reminiscences, trans. Kusumavati Deshpande, Delhi: National Bank Trust. Ryan, Mary (1990) Women in Public: Between Banners and Ballots, 1825–1880), Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Sarkar, Sumit (1985a) Modern India 1885–1947, Delhi: Macmillan. ——(1985b) ‘Social history: predicament and possibilities’, in Iqbal Khan, editor, Fresh Perspectives on India and Pakistan: Essays on Economics, Politics and Culture, Oxford. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty (1988) ‘Can the subaltern speak?’, in Nelson and Grossberg (1988). ——(1990), interview, Socialist Review, 20(3). Viwanathan, Gauri (1990) Masks of Conquest: Literary Studies and British Rule in India, London: Faber.

LUKE GIBBONS

IDENTITY WITHOUT A CENTRE: ALLEGORY, HISTORY AND IRISH NATIONALISM1

The state is concentric, man is eccentric. (James Joyce) In the memorable closing scene of James Joyce’s story ‘The Dead’, the composure of the urbane and self-centred Gabriel Conroy is shattered when he discovers that his wife, Gretta, still pines for a young man, Michael Furey, whom she knew years earlier in the west of Ireland. The night before she left for Dublin, the seriously ill Michael Furey had risen from his bed to see her, and died a week later from a chill caught standing in the cold winter rain. As snow begins to fall outside their hotel window, Gabriel’s thoughts drift towards the west of Ireland in a trancelike reverie: The time had come for him to set out on his journey westwards. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, f alling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, further westwards, softly falling on the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was f alling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns (1992a: 225). It is striking that for all its evocations of the sacred (the crosses, spears and thorns), Gabriel’s mental journey westwards is recreated in the profane image of the newspaper. According to Benedict Anderson, newspapers, and print culture in general, introduce a secular ‘transverse, cross-time’, which allows people to establish links with parts of their country they have never directly experienced, thus laying the basis for the ‘imagined community’ of nationalism (1983:30). Gabriel’s hollow, transverse relationship to the west of Ireland contrasts starkly with that of his wife, Gretta, whose memories of Michael Furey are precipitated by the chance hearing of an old Irish ballad which he used to sing, ‘The Lass of Aughrim’, as she is preparing to leave the

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dinner party on the feast of the Epiphany which forms the centrepiece of the story. For Joyce, it is this remnant of oral culture, rather than the ‘empty, homogeneous time’ of the newspaper, which is characteristic of the most resilient strains in Irish nationalism—or any subaltern culture, I would contend, which attempts to speak in the aphasic condition of colonialism. Gabriel writes for a newspaper and identifies with the latest European ideas, but this has little to do with the social milieu in which his wife, Gretta, grew up. Earlier in the story, he is upbraided by the nationalist Miss Ivors for refusing to travel to the west of Ireland and encounter native Gaelic culture at first hand, and—a related misdemeanour in her eyes—for writing in the Dublin Daily Express, which she considers an imperialist organ, and an adversary of the national revival.2 Anderson is correct in stating that the emptying out of time in print culture is constitutive of certain kinds of nationalism, but this applies mainly to forms of nationalism driven by state formation of the Western kind, characterized by centralization, unification and, one might add, colonial expansion. In contradistinction to this, as E.J. Hobsbawm points out, are those versions of nationalism intent on fragmentation and disaggregation, motivated by separation rather than unification (1977:4–7). Such good words as Hobsbawm (1991) can muster up for nationalism are reserved for the former kind, and he can scarcely conceal his contempt for those ‘fissiparous’ tendencies in nationalism which mobilize outside or against the centralized state, even for purposes of decolonization. Unlike the viable ‘ethnically and linguistically homogeneous entities which came to be seen as the standard forms of “nation-state” in the west,’ these aberrant strands in nationalism are ‘politically fluctuating and unstable.’ According to Hobsbawm, the nation must evolve under the aegis of the state: otherwise it is like a mollusc extracted from its shell, emerging in a ‘distinctly wobbly state’ (1991:164, 169, 181). It could be argued, however, that most of the justified criticism of nationalism as concealing exploitation, inventing tradition, or retreating into xenophobia and racialism, are properly directed at the classical European model rather than its more idiosyncratic peripheral variants. Literacy, and in particular print culture, is often presented as rescuing a ‘pre-political’ populace from the torpor and dogmatism of oral tradition. Yet while an alliance of print culture and Protestantism played a crucial role in laying the conditions for the Enlightenment and liberal democracy in Europe, it is worth recalling that it also consolidated logocentrism at the level of popular religious practice, establishing the immanence of the living word, the Voice of God, in the transparent text of the Bible. As Terry Eagleton puts it: Of course, for the puritan tradition, script has a privileged status. But that is no more than to say that the enigmatic materiality of the biblical text must be dispersed and deciphered by the power of grace, so that the

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living speech of its Author may be freed from its earthly encasement (1977:55). In the twentieth century, this suspicion of hermeneutics was linked to modernism itself, as part of an attempt to innoculate Western culture against the multivalence of tradition. For Susan Sontag: Transparence is the highest, most liberating value in art—and in art criticism—today…. Once upon a time (say, for Dante), it must have been a revolutionary and creative move to design works of art so that they might be experienced at several levels. Now it is not. It reinforces the principle of redundancy that is the principle affliction of modern life (1966:13).3 In this sense, the modernist project of the Enlightenment and advanced print cultures stands as much in need of deconstruction as many of the traditional societies it purports to bring into the contemporary world. It is true that many non-Western or ‘pre-modern’ cultures have shown a proclivity for dogmatism and fundamentalism, but it is far from clear that this is a result of their opposition to Western values. The insistence on the univocal and literal meaning of sacred texts among present-day fundamentalist movements would seem to owe more to Lockean-type conceptions of language, and scientific notions of clarity, than to the obscuranticism of traditional or so-called backward societies. As Rosemary Radford Ruether contends, summarizing recent research in this area, fundamentalist movements arise not only as a response to Western culture but may actively draw inspiration from it, ‘by selective adaptions to modern organizational and technological methods and scientific thought.’ She continues: Fundamentalism is not simply a historical conservatism. It is often militantly hostile to much of past tradition, which is seen as having become corrupted. Many fundamentalist movements see themselves as purging this corrupted tradition, but also as retrieving…some absolute truth beyond historical relativity and change. Thus most fundamentalisms claim some innerrancy of Scripture, or inf allibility of teachers, or both (1992:10–11).4 Thus in the context of Irish Catholicism, for example, it was the modernizers, the centralizing forces, in the Church who pressed the claims for Papal infallibility at the Vatican Council in 1870, an irony of progress that did not escape the attention of James Joyce. In his story ‘Grace’, one of the characters exults over the f act that of the two senior churchmen who held out against this high-handed arrogation of authority, one was the nationalist Archbishop Mac Hale of Tuam from the west of Ireland, who presided over a wayward

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popular religion that was inimical to the very idea of certainty.5 One of the main tasks of the ‘Devotional Revolution’ which swept the Catholic church in post-Famine Ireland, was to exorcise the baneful influence of traditional cultural practices (such as wakes, ‘keening’, ‘patterns’ at holy wells, and other ‘pagan’ rituals) from religious devotions, thus bringing Irish Catholicism into line with Roman Catholic orthodoxy.6 This augmentation of Catholic power was part of a wider transformation which also sought to dislodge nationalism from popular insurgency, integrating peasant culture into the institutions of state power—defined, of course, in terms of an imperial administration, at least where constitutional nationalists were concerned. The writer Sean O’Faolain was closer to the mark than even he perhaps realized, when he observed that before the Whig-inspired accommodation with state power under the leadership of Daniel O’Connell, the Irish people had ‘no absolute sense of themselves as a nation’ (1980:29, first italics mine).7 Allegory and agrarian insurgency Jacques Derrida’s contention that ‘logocentrism is a uniquely European phenomenon’ (1984:116) may be usefully extended to European conceptions of nationalism, in that the premium placed on coherence and abstraction, and the clarity of political consciousness, comes to resemble the unmediated selfpresence of the individual subject. It is this sense of unity and national integration which Western imperialism prided itself on exporting to what were referred to as the ‘discordant races’ of its empires. On 1 January 1877, the day Queen Victoria was proclaimed Empress of India, the (London) Times paid homage to the civilizing mission of English imperialism as it confronted the otherness of Asia, a continent vitiated by contingency and instability: It can hardly be to share the rapid vicissitudes of Asia, and to prove that policy is the creature of accident, that we have entered that new sphere. It is rather that we may introduce into it the deeper sentiments and grander ideas that have made Europe hitherto the leading quarter of the world. India, in itself, never had the prospect or even the thought of a political unity. Like Africa, the region was peopled with numberless races, who had their quarrels, but who were apparently capable of no grander objects than could be attained within their own territories, which were sufficient for the population…. Politically, they represent altogether one great fact, which is the single-all-sufficient of this day’s ceremony. They represent the proved impossibility of India uniting herself by her own internal development, or by any Asiatic agency. A self-made Indian union is as much an impossibility as a self-made African union.8

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—or, one might add, a self-made Irish union. According to Sir George BadenPowell, writing during the Home Rule controversy at the turn of the century, ‘Ireland does not contain the necessary elements of a separate nationality— for among the inhabitants there is no unity or individuality of blood, religion, laws, occupations, sentiments, history, or even tradition’ (1898:221). There is little trace here of the primordial unity and plenitude which Western phonocentrism is apt to visit upon pre-literate societies: a ‘self-made’ identity is decidedly the prerogative of the colonizer. In recent years, versions of this thesis, filtered through the work of modern historians such as Anderson, Hobsbawm and Ernest Gellner, have surfaced in Irish cultural debates as part of a revisionist challenge to the exaggerated ancestry bestowed on the Irish nation by romantic historians of the old school. Such mythic accounts of Ireland as ‘the oldest nation in Europe’ can be seen as part of an attempt to smuggle into Irish culture the continuity and permanence of English tradition as venerated by Edmund Burke, but while notions of stability and security come readily to colonial powers, they hardly make sense in societies ravaged by the depredations of Western expansionism.9 ‘The rapport of self-identity’, as Derrida puts it, is ‘always a rapport of violence with the other’ (1984:117). This helps to place in perspective the argument of the Irish historian Tom Dunne that not alone does Irish nationalism lack an ancient pedigree, it cannot be said to have emerged as a material force until it identified with the nation-state as conceived by Anglocentric, or mainstream European, political discourse. Though he makes no explicit connection between nationalism and print culture, the main target of Dunne’s and other related critiques (e.g., Cullen, 1988) is the vernacular culture of the so-called ‘hidden Ireland’ of the eighteenth century,10 a communal culture largely oral in nature except for those poets, scribes and scholars who had regular access to written sources. According to Dunne, native Irish culture in the early modern period failed to develop a coherent nationalist ideology because it lacked the centralizing mechanisms of the absolute monarchies that provided the infrastructure of the first nation-states: A national monarchy did not emerge in Ireland to form the nucleus of a centralised state, as happened in other countries. Outside pressure failed to bring political unity also, and instead newcomers were absorbed into the system of competing lordships (1980:11). It is hardly surprising that ‘outside pressures’ did not succeed in producing a clone of the centralized state, for it was precisely such a concentration of power in the centre that native culture was resisting. The stratagem of ‘divide and rule’ is one of the bogies of the imagined community of nationalism, but in certain cases it was the amorphousness of native cultures, the mollusclike qualities excoriated by Hobsbawm, which offered the most effective long-

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term defence against conquest. While it took almost four centuries to subdue the sprawling Indian peoples of North America, historians have suggested that it was the excessive centralization of the far more powerful Aztec and Inca civilizations which brought about their rapid downfall—once the emperors Montezuma and Atahualpa fell into Spanish hands, as Richard Peet describes it, their empires became ‘bodies without heads’ (1991:122). This principle did not go unnoticed by nationalist propagandists in Ireland, and even as late as the cultural revival at the turn of the century, it was used by some leftist commentators as a pretext for forging links between traditional Gaelic culture and the syndicalist version of Marxism promulgated by James Connolly, with its declared aversion to centralized power and the state. According to Aodh de Blacam, an English-born critic who came to Irish nationalism with the zeal of a convert, ‘it was the many-headedness, as of the hydra, of the Irish constitution that perplexed the enemy, who knew not where to strike’ (1919:22). It is true, he adds that pre-invasion Gaelic culture ‘was weak in central authority’, and the lack of ‘a strong military monarchy’ ensured that ‘when the most unscrupulous and most militaristic nation of Europe sent ravaging armies into Ireland, there was a tragic want of ruthlessness in the opposition that was offered.’ And yet [he continues] this want of centralization proved, in a sense, the nation’s salvation. Had the Irish State (sic) hung upon central institutions, the destruction thereof would have meant the nation’s destruction. Thus one great battle might have ended Irish independence (23).11 What Dunne sees, then, as a weakness in native culture, and the factor which inhibited the development of national consciousness, could be interpreted as its strength. This point is more or less conceded when he argues that the introduction of a state apparatus into Irish society with its attendant cultural and ideological agencies (such as institutionalized religious authority) saw to it that the quest for a unified identity worked against Irish independence: ‘Political unity and the transformation in attitudes and identity which accompanied it were imposed by English conquest in a manner which involved the destruction of the Gaelic system and political culture rather than its “modernization”.’ Yet, having demonstrated that political unity of this kind was the Trojan horse of colonization, he nevertheless proceeds to concur with the orthodox nationalist view that its absence was the cause of the destruction of the old Gaelic order: Gaelic Ireland did have important unifying features—common social and economic systems, law-codes, literature and religion…. Yet, while all of this points to a collective sense of Gaelic identity, it was a sense which conspicuously lacked a political dimension, even on the very basic level of a commitment to unity against foreign aggression.

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Looking at the European context, this was hardly surprising. The development of ‘national consciousness’ (to call it that) was one of the products of political unity under expansionist monarchies. This was the case, for example, in sixteenth century England and such ‘national consciousness’ formed an important part of the dynamics of Elizabethan imperialism in Ireland, just as its absence in Gaelic Ireland contributed to the failure of resistance to this imperialism (1980:11–12). What this attempt to measure an emergent Irish nationalism against British or European standards fails to recognize is that the bondsman is in no position to emulate the lord, for he is already implicated in his master’s identity. This is the fatal weakness in Marx’s famous dictum, frequently quoted in defence of Marxist appropriations of modernization theory: ‘The country that is most developed industrially only shows, to the less developed, the image of its own future’ (1976:91). If this is interpreted to mean that, say, Ireland or Scotland should have looked to England, the workshop of the world, as a prototype of their own future development, it conveniently overlooks, as Colin Leys points out, that the confidence and self-assurance of the English nation-state derived partly from the f act that its sovereignty extended to ‘not just Manchester and the Midlands, but also the Scottish “deer forests” (that is, vast regions of the “development of underdevelopment”) and the oppressed and stagnant home colony of Roman Catholic Ireland’ (1986:321). If Ireland looked to the image of England, in other words, it would end up seeing its own distorted reflection —as if in the ‘cracked looking glass of a servant’ with which Joyce liked to compare his work. One of the basic assumptions in arguments designed to rule out any semblance of nationalism before the development of the nation-state, is that members of pre-modern cultures are totally immersed in their own localities, and are not capable (as the London Times would have it) of elevating their minds to grander notions. This hypostatization of the local is simply the unified subject of the nation-state viewed through the reverse end of a telescope. As critics of Clifford Geertz’s ethnographic work have argued, the very attempt to seal of f the local f rom the wider social networks in which it is inserted is the conceptual equivalent of proclaiming a district: it is to place it in political quarantine (Pecora, 1989). For all Geertz’s careful elucidations of the local intricacies of the Balinese cockf ight, he f ails to tease out the wider implications of his own observation that the Balinese project on to the shape of their island the image of a cock taunting its more powerful neighbour Java. This is not to say that the particular and the general are fused: however, it does suggest, as William Roseberry avers, ‘that the cockfight is intimately related (though not reducible) to political processes of state formation and colonialism’ (1982:1021; cited in Biersack, 1989:82). This is how we should understand the sense of time and place in the symbolic practices of Irish culture and politics in the formative stages of

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nationalism, whether they take the form of poetry, popular ballads or agrarian insurgency. In the case of rural disorder and agrarian unrest in the pre-Famine period (1750–1845), the trend in revisionist Irish social history has been to dismiss it as an essentially local phenomenon, lacking political consciousness, and certainly operating without a wider sense of the colonial subjugation of Ireland. But while such agrarian violence was indeed ‘sporadic, local, unpredictable, continual, anonymous’ (O’Farrell, 1976:53), it also, as Tom Garvin has pointed out, ‘showed distinct signs of politicisation and articulation over long distances, although no really effective central authority emerged’ (1982:134). There is evidence to suggest that both Ribbonism (as its post-1800 manifestation is usually called) and Defenderism (the highly politicized Catholic agrarian movement of the 1780–1800 period) possessed a structure of delegate meetings, and that quite elaborate, underground intercounty structures existed, as well as extensive contacts with Irish groups overseas (140). So pervasive and clandestine were these networks that Garvin discerns in them the infrastructure of the later Fenian Organization, or Irish Republican Brotherhood, which was responsible for the Easter Rising of 1916, and which established the Irish Republican Army, or IRA, in 1919. Agrarian protest in the early nineteenth century had demonstrably acquired a complex political consciousness, in many ways more influential and certainly more subversive than the ‘official’, constitutional nationalist campaigns of Daniel O’Connell, or even the more revolutionary Young Ireland movement of 1840s, both of which helped to bring Irish nationalism into the mainstream European discourse of the nation-state. What is interesting for our present purposes, however, is the shadowy precursor of Ribbonism and Defenderism, the constellation of agrarian protest and secret societies known as the Whiteboy movement, which first came to public notice in the mid-eighteenth century. While clearly local and class-based in their immediate manifestations, the forms of material struggle in which Whiteboys were engaged had a wider remit than purely economic interests: they were also concerned, as Michael Beames puts it, ‘with the establishment and maintenance of alternative codes and values, and in defending those codes against attack from whatever source’ (1983:97). Agrarian violence not only borrowed its practices from the kind of peasant rituals associated with wakes and weddings, but outbreaks of Whiteboy activity also intensified around the time of important seasonal festivals such as Mayday, Halloween (Samhain), and the aftermath of Christmas (St Stephen’s Day, New Year’s Eve) (73; see also Wall, 1973:16). The most conspicuous evidence of the cross-over with other forms of peasant custom such as Mummers and Strawboys was the symbolic dress of male insurgents, and in particular the systematic adoption of female clothing: bonnets, veils, gowns and petticoats were pressed into service in transgressive costume drama. This was a notable feature of rural uprisings in other peasant societies but, as Natalie Zemon Davis points out, ‘in Ireland…we have the

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most extensive example of disturbances led by men disguised as women’ (1991:149; see also Beames, 1983:98–101). The assumption of a female persona was taken to the point where some of the Whiteboy organizations (‘whiteboy’ itself signifies the wearing of a white smock) masqueraded under female soubriquets: the Lady Clare boys, Lady Rock, Terry Alt’s mother and, in the nineteenth century, the Molly Maguires from the west of Ireland who later resurfaced as a militant organization in the coalfields of Pennsylvania in the 1870s. The threat posed by the anonymity and inscrutability of these societies was such that the authorities felt compelled to lift the veil, as it were, and impute some kind of organizing consciousness behind the scenes to their otherwise incomprehensible behaviour. It was as if the very fact that certain activities were imbricated in a narrative without a cohesive subject was sufficient to constitute them as ‘violent’. Given the basic assumption, moreover, that a subaltern culture was incapable of achieving unity or even intelligibility on its own terms, the organizing principle was invariably ascribed to some external agent, or form of manipulation from above. The landing of the French adventurer, Thurot, in the north of Ireland in 1760 sent shock waves into the colonial administration, and the alleged appearance of the Pretender, disguised as a woman, in the south of Ireland the following year was believed to be the immediate cause of the rise of the Whiteboys in 1761, confirming to the authorities’ satisfaction their own worst fears of an imminent Jacobite invasion. Although the Whiteboys did indeed march to the tune of ‘The Lad with the White Cockade’ and carried the white lily (both emblems of the Stuart dynasty deposed by the Williamite settlement), there is no reason to believe that they subscribed to the fully elaborated theories of paternalism and patriarchy which informed Jacobite ideology among English Tories.12 In fact, they owed their allegiance to a series of enigmatic female figures who hovered between the other world and everyday lif e in the imagination of the peasantry: ‘Shevane (Joanna) Meskill’ or ‘Sieve Oultagh’ (i.e., ghostly Sally). According to James Donnelly, these incendiary images found their way into peasant consciousness through cultural forms such as the ballad and prophetic poetry: Precisely how this usage originated is unknown, but it almost certainly derived its currency from the popular tradition in song and poetry of personifying Ireland as a woman and its people as her children…it would be wrong to interpret ‘Queen Sieve’ as a symbol of Ireland in a consciously nationalistic sense, but the common people were undoubtedly accustomed to this manner of representing the plight of the Irish poor as a collectivity (1978–9:27–8).

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Although these personifications may not meet the specifications of nationalism in an abstract or an ‘absolute sense’ (to cite O’Faolain’s terms above), they none the less provided a powerful symbolic means of lifting a set of grievances above local horizons. Natalie Zemon Davis points out with regard to peasant consciousness in France in the early modern period that: In the 1540s, the Rouen festive society could count on spectators and readers knowing the facts of local political life, but references to national or European events were usually general and even allegorical (1991:219). —the important point being, in Ireland at any rate, that it was not always possible to clearly distinguish what was factual and what was allegorical.13 Hence, the dying declaration of five Whiteboys hanged in Waterford in 1762 that by the mysterious Queen Sieve, ‘we meant a distressed harmless old woman, blind of one eye, who still lives at the foot of a mountain in the neighbourhood’ (Wall, 1973:16). Allegory here is not just a personification of an abstraction: it is part of the language of personal acquaintance. This intimate and yet otherworldly relationship with a female personification places it on a continuum with the allegorical figures of ‘Dark Rosaleen’, ‘Kathleen ni Houlihan’ in the visionary poetry and ballads of the period, who promised apocalyptic deliverance from the Williamite confiscations in Ireland.14 The instability of these images, and the absence of an unmediated concept of nationalism, proved an embarrassment to later cultural nationalists intent on establishing the kind of ‘self-present’ identity required for state-formation. One of the ways of explaining away the recourse to figuration was to construe it as a strategic device, deliberately coding information and sentiments that were already known in a factual sense, but which could not be uttered directly because of the fear of being charged with sedition.15 This explanation is on a par with functional accounts of Whiteboy dress which reduce it simply to disguise, a way of deceiving others. The French commentator Augustin Thiery was more to the point when he observed that those who had recourse to such symbolic practices also succeeded in placing a barrier between themselves and a reality that was too painful for clear and distinct ideas: The Irish love to make their country into a loving and beloved real being, they love to speak to it without pronouncing its name…it seems as if, under the veil of these agreeable illusions, they wished to disguise to their minds the reality of the dangers to which the patriot exposes himself (cited in Hayes, 1855:xxvii). It is not simply, therefore, that allegory comes after the event, a mask that can be removed at will: it is part of consciousness itself under certain conditions of

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colonial rule. ‘The very extravagance of allegory employed on these occasions’, wrote Edward Hayes, ‘is an unmistakeable index to the intensity of the persecution which produced it in the first place’ (1855:xxi). This disjunction between expression and experience, between the outward sign and its recondite meaning, reinforced the colonial prejudice that the Irish were inveterate liars, constantly reacting against the despotism of fact. In an article written in 1833 comparing Ribbonism in Ireland to the Thuggee in India, the Rev. Samuel O’Sullivan complained that even legal language, which drew on the coercive power of the state to stabilize meaning, was not immune to subversion from within: What is Ribbonism…but a species of political Thuggee, in which the conspirators are of one religion, and bind themselves by an oath of blood to the extermination of all whom opposition to their evil designs might be apprehended…if the Thugs are their superiors in the article of safe and expeditious murder, they are immeasureably beyond the Thugs in the article of skilful perjury, by which they make the very forms of law contribute to defeat the ends of justice (1853:197–8). The peasantry may have been subject to the law but they did not owe their allegiance to it: their lives were regulated by an alternative public sphere which was not allowed material expression but which was none the less capable of negating what overlaid it. The mollusc in this case could not be contained within its outer shell. As with law, so with linguistic shifts in a colonized culture. According to Edward Hayes, although ‘we are English in expression’, it is still the case that ‘we can be thoroughly Irish in thought’: ‘The fathers of the early church struck down paganism with weapons borrowed from its own armoury…and so, also, has Ireland conquered in her captivity, by her successful cultivation of the English tongue’ (1855:xxxiv). This, no doubt, is an over-optimistic reading of what was, after all, the virtual destruction of the old Gaelic order, but Hayes is correct in maintaining that it possessed what might be referred to as ‘negative capability’ (to misappropriate Keats’s phrase), acting as a vestigial, destabilizing force in the interstices of colonial discourse. As Stephen Dedalus reflects when the Dean of Studies eulogizes the English language in a well-known passage in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: The language in which we are speaking is his before it is mine. How different are the words home, Christ, ale, master, on his lips and on mine! I cannot speak or write these words without unrest of spirit. His language, so familiar and so foreign, will always be for me an acquired speech. I have not made or accepted its words. My voice holds them at bay. My soul frets in the shadow of his language (Joyce, 1992b:205).

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The secret scripture of the ‘The Dead’ In the Christmas-dinner scene in the same novel, Joyce depicts a bitter row between members of the Dedalus household over the Catholic church’s role in bringing about the fall of Parnell. The acrimony which has soured the festive atmosphere takes a turn for the worse when Mr Dedalus points to a portrait of his grandfather on the wall, and boasts to his friend John Casey, that his grandfather, for one, never let a priest sit at his table: —Do you see that old chap up there, John? he said. He was a good Irishman when there was no money in the job. He was condemned to death as a whiteboy. But he had a saying about our clerical friends, that he would never let one of them put his two feet under his mahogany (1992b:67). This piece of ancestry is borrowed from the history of Joyce’s own family for, as Richard Ellmann informs us, the novelist’s great-grandfather, also called James Joyce, was condemned to death in Cork f or Whiteboy activities, but was pardoned before execution (1965:10). On a later visit to Cork in the Portrait, the young Stephen meets an old man who actually knew his greatgrandfather: ‘old John Stephen Dedalus, and a fierce old fireeater he was. Now, then! There’s a memory for you!’ (Joyce, 1992b:101). The identification of the Whiteboys with ghostly forms (‘ghostly Sive’, as we have seen, was one of their avatars) found a kindred spirit in Stephen Dedalus for whom the past prefigured the present: ‘through the ghost of the unquiet father’, he states in his commentary on Hamlet in Ulysses, ‘the image of the unliving son looks forth’ (Joyce, 1946:192). It is these restless shades, and the culture of the west of Ireland imbued with the memory of the dead, which come to haunt Gabriel Conroy in the closing scenes of the story ‘The Dead’. When the thoughts of Gabriel’s wife, Gretta, turn westward, opening up an irreparable gulf between them, it is because of her hearing ‘The Lass of Aughrim’, the ballad once sung by her dead lover. In the allegorical mode of both poetry and popular insurgency which followed the Williamite confiscations in the eighteenth century, the refusal to name, for all its eloquence, is akin to the silence induced by the traumatic experience of loss (Deane, 1991b). Gretta’s muteness, her Veiled and sad voice’, can be seen in this context. Though transfixed by the ballad, its name has escaped her memory: ‘Mr D’Arcy,’ she said, ‘what is the name of that song you were singing?’ ‘It’s called The Lass of Aughrim,’ said Mr D’Arcy, ‘but I couldn’t remember it properly. Why? Do you know it?’

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‘The Lass of Aughrim’, she repeated. ‘I couldn’t think of the name.’ (Joyce, 1992a:213) Aughrim, a small village near her home town Galway in the west of Ireland, was the site in 1691 of the final battle in the Williamite wars which resulted in the destruction of the old Gaelic order. Though Gabriel consciously turns his back on this shattered culture, a second, inner voice infiltrates his thought and speech, threading allusions to King William and his colonial legacy in an almost liminal manner through the text. The ballad itself has political resonances in view of the tendency to allegorize Ireland as a female, for it relates the story of a young peasant woman who is seduced, and then abandoned, by a noble lord, an emblematic encounter, in Richard Ellmann’s words, of ‘the peasant mother and the civilized seducer’ (1965:257). On each occasion as Gabriel nervously contemplates his after-dinner speech, his thoughts turn to the snow-capped Wellington monument in the nearby Phoenix Park, and the adjoining ‘white field of Fifteen Acres’ where military reviews were staged as a form of colonial spectacle. After he finishes his speech—in which he assures his listeners that he ‘will not linger on the past’ or ‘let any gloomy moralizing’ intrude on the festive atmosphere—he is drawn to relate an amusing anecdote about his grandfather Patrick Morkan, and his horse Johnny who spent his life ‘walking round and round in order to drive the mill’ where he was working. One day Morkan decided to drive up to the Phoenix Park with his horse to see a military review: ‘And everything went on beautifully until Johnny came in sight of King Billy’s statue: and whether he fell in love with the horse King Billy sits on or whether he thought he was back again in the mill, anyhow he began to walk round the statue…Round and round he went…’ (Joyce, 1992a:209). Revenants of the Williamite past make their presence felt once more when members of the dinner party cross O’Connell bridge in a cab on their journey home. One of the party remarks: They say you never cross O’Connell bridge without seeing a white horse’ (the white steed being a traditional emblem of King William’s charger). Gabriel replies that all he can see is a white man, pointing to the snow-covered statue of Daniel O’Connell.16 Public monuments are expressions of of ficial memory, and bear witness to the power of the state to legitimate its triumphant version of the past, and assert its authority over its citizens. By their imposing presence, and their control of public space, they stand in stark contrast to the memories of the vanquished which attach themselves to fugitive and endangered cultural forms such as the street ballad. Yet it may be that monuments do not embody memory but efface it, absolving the citizen of the burden of remembering by the permanence of material form: ‘The less memory is experienced from the inside,’ writes

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Pierre Nora, ‘the more it exists only through its exterior scaffolding and outward signs’ (1989:13). Gabriel Conroy negotiates his life through such outward signs, in the hope that they will provide direct access to what they represent. He calls love by its name, and is unsettled when, somehow, the use of the correct word does not call up the experience: ‘Why is it that words like these seem to me so dull and cold? Is it because there is no word tender enough to be your name?’ (Joyce, 1992a:215). Like Patrick Morkan’s horse, he is so inured to habit that the outer shell loses its own materiality, becoming a substitute for the thing itself. It is striking that Gretta does not answer directly when Gabriel asks her (twice) if she loved Michael Furey, but looks instead to a half-remembered street ballad to come to terms with an unfathomable loss. Unlike monuments, ballads were excluded from the public sphere, and hence carried on a clandestine existence in the margins between the personal and the political, charging a personal event or memory with the impact of a political catastrophe —and vice versa. As Donal O’Sullivan points out, this was often no more the result of an accident, a patriotic song taking a familiar tune—usually that of a love song—and retaining the name of the girl in the love song, if only to indicate the original air. ‘There is nothing romantic in all this,’ he assures us, since ‘the choice of names is quite fortuitous’ (1981:130). In fact, as Gabriel admits, it can lead to a romantic intensity which he can barely comprehend: ‘So she had that romance in her life: a man had died for her sake. It hardly pained him now to think how poor a part he, her husband, had played in her life’ (Joyce, 1992a:223). For Gretta, it is not the transparency of the sign but the veiling of the voice, the dislocation between inner and outer, which enables her to break her silence. As in Joyce’s notion of an ‘epiphany’, the difference and incongruity of the surface manifestation, the maintenance of boundaries, is essential, for if it fused with the experience, there would be be no need to go beyond it: Ever mindful of limitations, [the true artistic sensibility] chooses rather to bend upon these present things and so to work upon them and fashion them that the quick intelligence may go beyond them to their meaning which is still unuttered (1961:68). In a short article surveying the political situation in Ireland in 1907, James Joyce wrote that Irish nationalism is characterized by ‘a double struggle’—the anti-imperial struggle, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, an internal struggle, ‘perhaps no less bitter’, between constitutional nationalism and a dissident, insurrectionary tradition beginning with the Whiteboys and passing through to the Fenian (IRB) movement.17 Within the narrative framework of ‘The Dead’, and indeed in terms of popular cultural forms, this internal struggle is articulated through the competing strategies of the newspaper, and the popular ballad, in addressing questions of history and identity. This does not

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mean that modern media forms are confronted by a primordial oral tradition, at one with itself in an imaginary wholeness before the fall brought about by letters and universal reason. As David Lloyd (1992) has argued, not least of the reasons the popular ballad attracted the opprobrium of state-builders intent on an unproblematic ‘unity of culture’ was its ephemeral, fragmented status, its refusal to act as a source of originary plenitude for the higher self of the nation. In the construction of ‘the national’, therefore, complexity and cultural critique are not the sole preserve of the newspaper and print culture, or the type of abstract political consciousness required by state formation in advanced Western countries. By the mid-nineteenth century, it was apparent to William Thackeray that the ‘rationality’ which print culture was expected to cultivate was already skewed in Ireland by oral tradition, and popular religious practices which he dismissed as ‘lies and superstition’: Leave such figments to magazine writers and ballad-makers; but, corbleu! it makes one indignant to think that people in the United Kingdom, where a press is at work and good sense is abroad…should countenance such savage superstitions and silly, grovelling heathenisms (1880:221). By superstition here, Thackeray means the redundancy of speech, the ‘loud nothings, windy emphatic tropes and metaphors’ that abound in a recalcitrant culture traversed, but not yet fully regulated, by the book: ‘If I were Defender of the Faith’, he declares, ‘I would issue an order to all priests and deacons to take to the book again…mistrusting that dangerous facility given by active jaws and a hot imagination’ (221). It is important to bear in mind, moreover, that such indeterminacy as speech possesses in this context is historically bounded, for even though a level of undecidability is a feature of all language, some cultures are in a better position than others to stabilize the allegorical impulse in a given speech community. As James Clifford puts it: Whereas the free play of readings may in theory be infinite, there are, at any historical moment, a limited range of canonical and emergent allegories available to the competent reader (the reader whose interpretation will be deemed plausible by a specific community)…. Reading is indeterminate only to the extent that history itself is openended (1986:110, 120). It may well be that under certain conditions of relative historical continuity or legal-rational administration, such as those which obtained in the exemplary European nation-states invoked by Hobsbawm, language and identity acquired the kind of fixity that monuments confer upon memory. But this option is not open to all national cultures, particularly those on the receiving

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end of colonialism which have known otherness from the inside. Mikhail Bakhtin writes that ‘it is quite possible to imagine and postulate a unified truth that requires a plurality of consciousnesses, one that cannot in principle be fitted into the bounds of a single consciousness, one that is, so to speak, by its very nature full of event potential and is born at a point of contact among various consciousnesses’ (1984:81). The Hegelian standards of clarity and abstraction prescribed for political consciousness in the metropolitan centre do not exhaust all possibilities of national identity. The owl of Minerva may only fly at dusk, but Dedalus was able to wing his way through the Celtic twilight, albeit by flying close to the ground. Notes 1 I am grateful to Ien Ang, David Lloyd, and Clair Wills for their critical discussions during the preparation of this paper and to all those who responded at the ‘Dismantle Fremantle’ conference. 2 The Dublin Daily Express had an explicit editorial comment to reconcile ‘the rights and impulses of Irish nationality with the demands and obligations of imperial dominion.’ It ceased publication in 1921, the year the Anglo-Irish Treaty was signed (Brown, 1937:35). 3 It is worth noting that in a recent effort to update modernism in the name of ‘antifoundationalist thought’, Michael Fried maintains that modernist works should ‘seek an ideal of self-sufficiency and what I call “presentness”…Effects of presentness can still amount to grace’ (1983:232–4). 4 According to Malise Ruthven, it is no coincidence that many fundamentalists have a scientific training: ‘For all the jeremiads that fundamentalism, Islamic and Christian, lances at Western “materialism”, it is fundamentalism that is hard, factual and philistine…Fundamentalism is the most materialistic of contemporary ideologies, a throwback to the mechanistic values of the Victorians (1991:142). It is striking that Ruthven projects on to fundamentalism the self-presence and immediacy of meaning that Sontag and Fried associate with high modernism. 5 Archbishop Mac Hale’s questioning of Papal infallibility was partly motivated by his nationalism, in that it was bound up with the dissident ‘Gallican’ movement which sought a degree of national autonomy within the church, as opposed to the ‘Ultramontanist’ tendency to centralize power in Rome. 6 Wakes, ‘keening’ (a form of ritual lamenting performed by females at wakes) and ‘patterns’ (popular, and frequently ribald, religious festivals which commemorated local patron [hence ‘pattern’] saints at holy wells) were subject to systematic interdiction by the post-Famine church. See E.Larkin (1972); S.J. Connolly (1982) and the excellent overview in his pamphlet Religion and Society in NineteenthCentury Ireland (1985). 7 For the accommodation between official Catholicism and the colonial administration in the nineteenth century, see Inglis (1987), chapter 5, and Lloyd (1987). 8 ‘The Intent of British Imperialism.’ The Times (London), 1 January 1877. Reprinted in Kohn (1968).

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9 The attempt to impose Burkean ideas of continuity on Irish history is critically analyzed in Tom Dunne (1988:72–3), and in Gibbons (1991). 10 Daniel Corkery’s classic nationalist study of eighteenth-century Gaelic poetry, The Hidden Ireland, was published in 1924. 11 I trace the development of this critical, ‘decentred’ version of Irish nationalism in two sections of The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, Vols ii, iii (Deane, 1991a). 12 The combination of patriarchy and paternalism in the political theory which informed Jacobitism is discussed in Pateman (1988), chapters 2–4. 13 For a discussion of the impossibility of separating factual and allegorical levels in ethnography, see Clifford (1986:119). 14 As Louis Cullen remarks, for all the diffuseness of the visionary poetry of the period, some of the poems are so homely and topical that ‘we are almost listening to the conversations in some circles in Munster, in effect to the loose talk which alarmed Protestants in Cork or Clare, the two great counties of literary composition in Irish’ (1988:48). 15 See, for example, John Hand’s account: ‘Since the days when it became treason to love their country, the Irish poets usually adopted allegory, such as we find in “Dark Rosaleen”. They sang of Ireland as the “Dark Little Rose”, the “Shan Van Vocht” [i.e., the poor old woman]…and under a hundred other names’ (1904: 3266). 16 Daniel O’Connell may be seen as the first political leader to systematically align the dominant strands in Irish nationalism with the state rather than the nation, although, as we have noted above (n.7), the state in question was that of a colonial administration. The O’Connell monument is thus placed on a continuum with the other icons of colonial rule that tend to attract Gabriel’s eye on the Dublin skyline: the Wellington monument, the Fifteen Acres, and the gloomy façade of the Four Courts which ‘stood out menacingly against the heavy sky.’ 17 See James Joyce: This party under different names: “White Boys”, “Men of ’98”, “United Irishmen”, “Invincibles”, “Fenians”, has always refused to be connected with either the English political parties or the Nationalist parliamentarians. They maintain (and in this assertion history fully supports them) that any concessions that have been granted to Ireland, England has granted unwillingly, and, as it usually put, at the point of a bayonet’ (1959:188).

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Brown, Stephen, J. (1937) The Press in Ireland: A Survey and Guide, Dublin: Browne & Nolan. Clifford, James (1986) ‘On ethnographic allegory’, in Clifford, James, and Marcus, George, E., editors, Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, Berkeley: University of California Press. Connolly, S.J. (1982) Priests and People in Pre-Famine Ireland, Dublin: Gill & Macmillan. ——(1985) Religion and Society in Nineteenth Century Ireland, Dundalk: Dundalgen Press. Cullen, Louis (1988) The Hidden Ireland: Reassessment of a Concept, Gigginstown, Mullingar: The Lilliput Press. Davis, Natalie Zemon (1991) Society and Culture in Early Modern France, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Deane, Seamus (1991a) editor, The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, London: Faber & Faber. ——(1991b) ‘Silence and eloquence’, The Guardian, 12 December 1991. de Blacam, Aodh (1919) Towards the Republic: A Study of New Ireland’s Social and Political Aims, Dublin: Thomas Kiersey. Derrida, Jacques (1984) ‘Dialogue with Jacques Derrida’, in Kearney, Richard, editor, Dialogues with Contemporary Continental Thinkers, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Donnelly, James S., jun. (1978–9) ‘The Whiteboy movement, 1761–65’, Irish Historical Studies, XXI. Dunne, T.J. (1980) ‘The Gaelic response to conquest and colonization: the evidence of the poetry’, Studia Hibernica, 20. Dunne, Tom (1988) ‘Hauntedbyhistory:IrishRomanticwriting 1800–50’, in Porter, Roy and Teich, Mikulas, editors, Romanticism in National Context, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 72–3. Eagleton, Terry (1977) ‘Ecriture and eighteenth-century fiction’, in Barker, Francis et al., editors, Literature, Society and the Sociology of Literature, Colchester: University of Essex. Ellmann, Richard (1965) James Joyce, New York: Oxford University Press. Fried, Michael (1983) ‘How modernism works: a reply to T.J.Clark’, in Mitchell, W. J. T., editor, The Politics of Interpretation, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Garvin, Tom (1982) ‘Defenders, Ribbonmen and others: underground political networks in pre-famine Ireland, Past and Present, 96 (August). Gibbons, Luke (1991) ‘Race against time: colonial discourse and Irish history’, The Oxford Literary Review, 13. Hand, John (1904) ‘Street songs and ballads and anonymous verse’, in Irish Literature, Vol. 8. New York: P.F. Collier & Sons. Hayes, Edward (1855) The Ballads of Ireland, Vol. 1. London: Fullerton & Co. Hobsbawm, Eric (1977) ‘Some reflections on “The break-up of Britain”’ New Left Review, 105 (Sept-Oct), 4–7. ——(1991) Nations and Nationalism since 1780, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Inglis, Tom (1987) Moral Monopoly: The Catholic Church in Modern Irish Society, Dublin: Gill & Macmillan. Joyce, James (1946) Ulysses, New York: Modern Library.

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——(1959) ‘Fenianism: the last Fenian’, in Mason, Ellsworth and Ellmann, Richard, editors, The Critical Writings of James Joyce, London: Faber & Faber. ——(1961) Stephen Hero, Spencer, Theodore, editor & introduction, London: Ace Books. ——(1992a) ‘The Dead’, in his Dubliners, Harmondsworth: Penguin. ——(1992b) Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Kohn, Hans (1968) editor, Nationalism and Realism: 1852–1879, Princeton, NJ: D. Van Nostrand Company, 134–8. Larkin, E. (1972) ‘The devotional revolution in Ireland 1850–1875’, The American Historical Review, LXXVII. Leys, Colin (1986) ‘Conflict and convergence in development theory’, in Mommsen, Wolfgang J. and Osterhammel, Jurgen, editors, Imperialism and After: Continuities and Discontinuities, London: Allen & Unwin. Lloyd, David (1987) Nationalism and Minor Literature: James Clarence Mangan and the Emergence of Irish Cultural Nationalism. Berkeley: University of California Press. ——(1992) ‘Adulteration and the Novel: Monologic Nationalism and the Colonial Hybrid’, in Anomalous States: Irish Writing and the Post-Colonial Moment. Dublin: Lilliput Press. Marx, Karl (1976) Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Trans. Ben Fowkes, Vol. 1. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Nora, Pierre (1989) ‘Between memory and history: Les Lieux de Memoire’, Representations, 26 (Spring). O’Faolain, Sean (1980) King of the Beggars: A Life of Daniel O’Connell, Dublin: Poolbeg Press. O’Farrell, Patrick (1976) ‘Millenialism, messianism, and utopianism in Irish History’, in Drudy, P.J., editor, Anglo-Irish Studies, ii. O’Sullivan, Donal (1981) Songs of the Irish, Dublin: Mercier Press. O’Sullivan, Samuel (1853) ‘Thuggee in India and Ribbonism in Ireland’, in Remains of Rev. Samuel O’Sullivan, D.D., Vol. 3, Dublin: McGlashen. Pateman, Carol (1988) The Sexual Contract, London: Polity Press. Pecora, Vincent P. (1989) ‘The limits of local knowledge’, in Veeser, H. Aram, editor, The New Historicism, New York: Routledge. Peet, Richard (1991) Global Capitalism: Theories of Societal Development, London: Routledge. Reuther, Rosemary (1992) ‘A world on fire with faith’, New York Times Book Review, 26 January 1992. Roseberry, William (1982) ‘Balinese cockfights and the seduction of anthropology’, Social Research, 49. Ruthven, Malise (1991) A Satanic Affair: Salman Rushdie and the Wrath of Islam, London: The Hogarth Press. Sontag, Susan (1966) Against Interpretation, New York: Delta. Thackeray, William (1880) The Irish Sketch Book and Critical Reviews, London: Smith, Elder & Co. Wall, Maureen (1973) ‘The Whiteboys’, in Williams, T.Desmond, editor, Secret Societies in Ireland, Dublin: Gill & Macmillan.

ZOË SOFIA

HEGEMONIC IRRATIONALITIES AND PSYCHOANALYTIC CULTURAL CRITIQUE

Let me confine my remarks about cultural studies in general to the following observations: that the Marxisms from which it sprang were not explicitly Freudo-Marxisms. But do we detect a certain return of this repressed concern with psycho-politics amongst those works that highlight the pleasures or fantasies of cultural production, reception and mediation? An overt psychoanalytic approach is not entirely alien to cultural studies, especially where it borders with feminist film theory (strongly influenced by Freud and Lacan, especially via Laura Mulvey), or with feminist critiques of culture, science and technology informed by the (American) object-relations school of psychoanalysis (e.g., as represented by Nancy Chodorow). The collection Formations of Fantasy includes works more centrally within a culturalstudies framework, and notably a sample of Valerie Walkerdine’s illuminating investigations into the relations of pleasure, mastery and enculturation (Burgin, Donald and Kaplan, 1986; see also Walkerdine, 1981, 1986, 1990). However, I will argue that the potential value of psychoanalysis for cultural studies is greater than is apparent from the best-known psychoanalytic cultural/critical paradigms. This paper eschews making any arrogant claims about what ‘cultural studies’ is or ought be about. I do not proclaim the line of study presented here as an exemplary, best or most ‘sexy’ model of cultural studies. Rather, the aim is to outline some psychoanalytic principles and theories which could enrich and usefully complement other approaches to the study and critique of cultural formations. Psychoanalysis and cultural studies: why? why not? Where might cultural studies deploy psychoanalysis? One place is wherever questions of ‘taste’, ‘appeal’ or ‘formations of pleasure’ arise. Here, it is not enough to simply notice that pleasure is transpiring, or to confess that it does amongst critics too. Psychoanalysis can provide a vocabulary and technique for analyzing and probing the specifics of that pleasure: what kind is it? Around what erotic, semiotic, technological and phenomenological axes does it revolve? Or, to put it another way, what kinds of fantasies are being

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mobilized to invoke this pleasure? Is the pleasure an end in itself, or does it serve other purposes ? How and in whose interests are formations of pleasure (re)produced? These kinds of psycho-political questions can also be turned onto what psychoanalysis would call the ‘counter-transference’ of cultural critics ourselves, to help us become more aware of our own investments in the field, and of the irrational blind spots that distort our vision, including, for example, the androcentrism that persists even amongst those who claim to have ‘taken account of’ (or should we say, ‘swallowed up’?) feminism. More generally, the psychoanalysis of cultural formations can contribute to the critique of hegemony (and I am assuming there are still enough people interested in the task for it to be worth talking about). For psychoanalysis—as well as the deconstructive philosophy it has influenced—poses that signs and texts have ambivalent meanings, and that there are constitutive disjunctures between latent and manifest significations. Freud’s analysis of textual pleasure suggested that formal, aesthetic pleasures were like ‘foreplay’ for enjoyment of the more infantile, egoistic and erotic fantasies purveyed by the text.1 Similarly, hegemonic cultural formations do not simply secure consent through conscious appeals to readily available formal categories within ideology, or categories legitimated as ‘rational’ or ‘natural’. Ideology is also, as Marxists since Marx have recognized, highly contradictory and at times quite phantasmic in character. Indeed, to reiterate a point I have learned from Bob Hodge’s brilliant semiotic psychoanalyses of cultural practices and texts, it is precisely by deploying contradictory, ambivalence-ridden, polysemic signs that hegemonic texts can manage to appeal to, and reinforce some kind of common sense amongst a wide diversity of people(s).2 Psychoanalysis can be a powerful tool for charting the interplay of manif est and latent dimensions of cultural texts and discourses, and for naming with more precision the hegemonic irrationalities that are the intimate counterpoints of ‘official’ or rationalized positions: in short, the mythology that underlies, exceeds, and accompanies the ideology.3 By the phrase ‘hegemonic irrationalities’, I wish to indicate a dimension of culture that might elsewhere be discussed as myth, and to clarify that although as a psychoanalytic critic I may ipso facto be a ‘romantic’, I do not adhere to the kind of romanticism which would regard pleasure, fantasy, or unnameable textual excess as somehow inherently subversive. The phrase is meant to remind us that cultures produce (and endlessly transform) their own sets of fantasies, symbols, favoured stories, rituals, etc. Such excesses to more rationalized cultural forms are only unnameable if one chooses to remain in polite conspiracy with those embarrassed by too close a scrutiny of their psycho-political investments. For the fact that these irrationalities and pleasures are not necessarily ‘legitimated’ (that is, overtly expressed and sanctioned as ‘official culture’) does not mean they are counter-hegemonic or outside of history.4 Lacking the force of law, they may nevertheless be potent organizers of sense. To borrow a metaphor from chaos theory, hegemonic

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irrationalities (or myths) act like ‘strange attractors’ in a cultural field: they represent impossible states of a system whose oscillations are nevertheless configured in relation to these gravitational points. This metaphor in turn suggests that effective cultural change would require transforming the strange attractors that shape ideology and cultural practice. It is to this end that my own inquiries are ultimately directed. Why would cultural studies not want to engage with psychoanalysis? Some theorists might be unwilling to take psychoanalysis on board because it is too subjectivist or essentialist to fit within a framework whose concerns are with the historical specificity of cultural practices and struggles for meaning. Certainly this criticism could be made of the psychoanalytic orthodoxy familiar to us from feminist film theory of the seventies and eighties, which has been strongly influenced by Jacques Lacan and the Ecole Freudienne. Althusser’s structuralist Marxist reading of Lacan provided the political/ theoretical justification for the many subsequent interpretations of the way cultural texts (and most notably, film) construct and interpellate subjects within the order of ideology. But this rubric has worn thin; I suggest it is time for renewal of a political/critical psychoanalytic approach to culture. Those sympathetic to Lacanian theory might ask: doesn’t it constitute a ‘radical’ return to Freud that gives due weight to the operations of culture and language? My short answer: no; Lacanism is a big part of the problem. Lacan’s trickiness lies within the way that, under the cover of a supposed ‘return to Freud’, he incorporated various aspects of Kleinian revisions to Freudian theory,5 especially regarding pre-phallic and pre-linguistic forms of symbolization and the splitting of subjectivity within the pre-Oedipal period. But he reworked these to fit within a structuralist and language-centred framework that remained anchored around the problematics of the gendered, Oedipal subject and the have/have-not of the phallus. Despite concessions to Kleinian theories of pre-Oedipal subject formation—for example, in notions of projective identification, the mirror phase, the objet petit a (a development of Abraham’s notion of the ‘part-object’, central to Kleinian theory), and so on —Lacan’s insistence that the human is not a subject until it/he is inscribed within the law/language of the Father obscures these pre-Oedipal dimensions of subjectivity. The theory can reinforce androcentric common-sense notions that ignore women’s labour of socialization and claim a child isn’t a person until it’s toilet trained and can chat with its dad; or the notion that a woman can never be a ‘proper’ subject because she lacks the phallus…ideas about as new and as radical as Aristotle. Theoretical insistence that the phallus is a (linguistic) signifier not an (anatomical) organ makes little difference to the outcome of Lacan’s algebraic equations around lack, desire and subjectivity, equations that allow for only two gender positions. Thankfully, more feminist critics have come to realize how this kind of thinking leads to an impasse of theory, providing no way out of the pre-given structures of language and subjectivity—except perhaps through a modernist avant-gardism. For

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Constance Penley, Judith Butler and contributors to Formations of Fantasy, notions of ‘fantasy’ and ‘masquerade’ aid escape from the strictures of this twogender model of sexuality/textuality (see e.g., Penley, 1989; Butler, 1990). A famous Lacanian slogan, ‘the unconscious is structured like a language’, encourages analysis and interpretation in terms of the arbitrary and (quasi) phonemic binaries and inevitable absences in the more abstract (and linguistically mediated) modes of human communication. But what if the unconscious were structured like a shopping mall? What if desire were not just deferred indefinitely along a chain of signifiers, but moved through various zones where it coupled with and constituted itself through assemblages of objects: toys, tools, clothes, junk food, joysticks? Eroticism here is not just confined to the little increment of pleasure attached to the play of (verbal) signification, but is directly expressed in connection with objects, technologies and practices themselves. This is close to the model of ‘desiring production’ elaborated in Deleuze and Guattari’s studies of Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1983, 1988), whose work represents the most significant advance along the Freudo-Marxist front since Reich, Marcuse and Brown. The Lacanian redefinition of the unconscious as the word/locus of the cultural/linguistic Other (a redefinition inspired also by Levi-Strauss’s structuralist anthropology) effectively closes the opening Freud had made to appreciate the productive part played by the poetic, extralinguistic, and polymorphously perverse components of the human bodymind as they enter the social collectivity as culture. After Lacan, we can speak very readily of the inscription of culture—the language from/of the Other—into the individual subject’s unconscious, but we’ve almost forgotten that part of Freud to which Lacan didn’t return, the part that stakes out a place for the productive force the unconscious has in shaping culture, especially (and this is my particular interest) shaping technologies. Specifying the field: sublimation Psychoanalytic studies of the role of the unconscious in determining culture come under the general heading of ‘sublimation’. The basic idea is that even though humans are taught to repress many desires and fantasies as part of their socialization into pre-existing structures of subjectivity and kinship (i.e., gender binaries), and are only allowed to express eroticism in certain wellcontrolled forms (usually: genitally focused reproductive hetero-sexuality), the repressed eroticism returns through (is sublimated into) cultural practices and artefacts that allow perverse and infantile fantasies to be acted out in attentuated, collective and socially useful forms. Putting it crudely, the sadist can become a surgeon, excremental eroticism can be sublimated into activities like plumbing, desires to possess and control the mother can be satisfied by activities to explore, conquer and appropriate lands, knowledge, other social ‘bodies’ and subjects (especially wives, daughters, slaves,

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employees), etc., desires to kill and supplant the Oedipal father can be expressed in religious or intellectual ‘revolutions’ that overthrow the ‘founding fathers’.6 Out of considerations of length, I will leave out an account of the history of psychoanalytic theories of sublimation, and merely assert that though there was a wealth of psychoanalytic explorations of the topic prior to and during the ‘Great Debates’ between the Kleinians and Anna Freudians in the forties, with notable but sporadic developments since then (e.g., Marcuse, Brown, Deleuze and Guattari), the full implications of this notion for cultural theory have yet to be realized.7 Interestingly, Freud points out that the energies available for sublimation are by and large the perverse components of sexual instincts, for why should we seek metaphorical or attenuated genital and heterosexual pleasures when the orgasmically literal is at hand, and moreover sanctioned by social conventions?8 It’s the perverse ones we need to sublimate (as it is to perverse gratifications that much of the apparatus of advertising arguably appeals). The (quasi)phonemic binarism associated with the phallus (you have it or you don’t) is exactly what is not needed for understanding the character of technologies. For as Róheim pointed out, following the lead of Melanie Klein, the tool is a kind of transitional object, arising as a formation midway between self and other, and conceived as a ‘brainchild’, a bit of the self projected into the world as a kind of guarantee against object loss: in the event of abandonment (e.g., by the mother), humans would still ‘have these children of their minds to love’ (1943:96). The tool’s prototype is not the (anatomically anchored) phallus but the penis-breast, an undecidable fetish object that could be thought of as formed in the turning from the maternal breast to the paternal phallus, by which the penis comes to substitute for and signify the lack of the breast.9 If the phallus is the linchpin of the Lacanian Symbolic, the penis-breast would be emblem of ‘the Mythic’, a dimension of collective enterprise that is not entirely anchored around the logic of language and the binary +/• of the phallus; an arena of expression and cultural (re) production where anatomical lacks (e.g., of the penis or womb) can be made good in fantasy objects and ritual; a mode of communication where excess is normal, and difference is plural rather than binary; an iconography whose erotic prototypes are not anatomical but oneiric—polymorphously perverse dream-bodies. A little psychoanalytic cultural theory may be worse than none at all if it penetrates no further than the canonical and easily acknowledged ‘manifest’ and anatomical associations of official symbols (e.g., Oedipus stories and phallic lacks). A psychoanalytic criticism that collapses psycho-sexuality on to sociological categories of ‘women’ and ‘men’10 can simply become another version of bourgeois subjectivism, speaking of nothing more unsettling than what was always already legitimated in the mainstream/ malestream of the Symbolic, and ignoring or remaining puzzled by the

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contradictions and ambiguities of the Mythic. Failing to push psychoanalysis to its potentially radical and iconoclastic limits, such criticism can remain trapped in the return of the expressed. To briefly illustrate the shift in perspective I am proposing: from within the officially legitimated arena Lacan calls ‘the Symbolic’, technologies like the skyscraper and gun are readily interpretable as ‘phallic symbols’, but at the mythic level, the erotic symbolism is more perverse and bisexual. The gun is interpretable as a phallic anus dentatus that farts/spits out a penetrating tooth/ turd (the gun as fart-fang?), while the skyscraper serves as an enclosing panoptic matrix—a womb with a view. Like the phallus, whose magic is enhanced by its associations with the nourishing materiality of the breast, these fetishized objects derive their power to fascinate from the extraphallic associations with which they are invested: their excremental and the uterine associations are unnamed (but not unnameable) excesses to these supposedly ‘obvious’ masculine symbols. Psychoanalytic cultural criticism can go beyond interpreting technological objects as organ-metaphors, and, following the examples of Freud, Gèza Róheim, Norman O.Brown, Lewis Mumford, Marshall McLuhan, Paul Virilio (etc.), it could identify the tendencies expressed in these objects and the institutions that generate them. Thus the gun may be read as a metonym of speedy and lethal penetration across terrain and through flesh, a tendency related to the military investments in technologies of speed (Virilio and Lotringer, 1983; Virilio, 1986, 1989). This tendency took a quantum leap this century into the Einsteinian/nuclear mode of wasting through radiant lightdeath…Star Wars technology. Technologies like skyscrapers are expressions of the alienated fantasy of separating from (Mother) Earth by constructing technological cocoons as substitutes for the given world;11 they are also one of the many devices that encode the tendency to mask and separate bosses and workers from the effects of their corporate actions, examples of institutional architectures that allow otherwise moral and well-behaved individuals to participate in collective acts of biocide without feeling any sense of personal responsibility.12 We have not decoded a hegemonic irrationality if we have not accounted for the intense ambivalences and perverse aspects of mythic and unconscious formations. In the official word on gender, there is only sexual difference, maternity is abhored, and the prospect of self/other inmixing arouses horror. Yet if mother-related penis-breast and penis dentatus monsters like the Alien aroused so much abhorrence, why are so many millions of dollars invested into producing—and viewing—images of them? As Freud has taught us, the officially feared is often the secretly desired, the revered has its loathsome underside; in Joseph Campbell’s terms myth is the everyday revealed in its monstrous aspect. For example, Mary Ann Doane’s essay ‘Technophilia: technology, representation, and the feminine’ (in the collection Body/Politics (Doane,

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1990), keeps within the binaristic model of ‘sexual difference’ conventional within feminist film theory, under which any sign of ‘femininity’ as well as any sign of excess can be equated with a sign of ‘woman’, and ‘woman’ with ‘the maternal’ and all of the above with ‘the feminine’ and/or ‘the female’.13 These slippages collaborate with the ‘official word’ by locating all monstrosity on the side of ‘woman’ and help obscure the masculine excesses (including bisexual formations) that have been sublimated into fantasies of technological reproduction. To appreciate these hegemonic monstrosities, we could take the following passage from ‘Technophilia’ and substitute affective terms with their opposites, placing ‘desire’, ‘hope’, or ‘pleasure’ wherever the words ‘anxiety’, ‘fear’, or ‘terror’ occur, and vice versa (the substitute words are in bold): Technology promises to more strictly control/deregulate, supervise/ yield to, regulate/proliferate, the maternal—to put/remove limits on it. But/For somehow the fear/hope lingers—perhaps the maternal will contaminate the technological. For aren’t we now witnessing a displacement of the excessiveness and overproliferation previously associated with the maternal to the realm of technologies of representation…? One response to such anxiety/desire is the recent spate of horror films that delineate the horror/enjoyment of the maternal —of that which harbours otherness within, where the fear/hope is always that of giving birth to the monstrous (Doane, 1990:170). By restoring ambivalence, this reading tactic discloses a mythic countersense at work. The sentence ‘For aren’t we now witnessing…?’ actually makes more sense within the alternative translation, where technological fertility appears as an effect of the (masculine, technologically mediated) desire to be maternal. For in contradiction to the official word on the difference between the female reproduction and masculine cultural production, the hope is precisely that the technological will not only be ‘contaminated’ by the maternal, but will take on its reproductive qualities. It is not the full and fecund body of the mother that inspires anxiety, but the prospect of its being entirely emptied of contents. Researchers, explorers, miners, and producers of technological half-lives desire a maternal body with secret things inside it, things that can be searched for, retrieved, incorporated, spat out as abject if need be, or reworked into new kinds of bodies. But the anxiety—and the real danger—is that all this sadistic appropriation depletes and destroys the planetary source. Hence the defensive fantasy of an infinitely plenteous Big Mother—a veritable Magic Pudding of a planet, or a seemingly self-contained and self-replenishing shopping mall—which is, far from being a freak-out, one of the central and justifying myths of technoscientific capitalism. This is one of those hegemonic irrationalities which has been normalized and dubbed ‘realistic’ (as in ‘Realistically, we have to mine in this forest’) in contrast to

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the environmentalists’ more ‘pessimistic’ concern for planetary finitude, which the developers term ‘unrealistic’, ‘idealistic’, or, as we heard recently elected Liberals in Tasmania describe anti-logging protesters, ‘irresponsible’. But who, we urgently ask, is taking responsibility for the technological monsters that are devouring the lives of future generations? Doane’s interpretations are not wrong, but partial, and insufficiently dialectical for appreciating the ambiguities of sublimation. Her claim that new reproductive technologies arouse anxiety because they ‘threaten to put into crisis the very possibility of the question of origins’ makes more sense as a statement of many women’s fears about technologies for controlling or stimulating reproduction than it does about hegemonic masculine irrationalities, which aim precisely at undermining maternal origin and surpassing it with technological fertility. Psychoanalytic anthropology offers a better starting point than cryptosociological (or anatomical) gender theory for cultural studies. Rather than centring on subjectivity and the individual unconscious, the focus would be on mythic constellations, and on the relations between cultural and individual expressions of the unconscious. One line of psychoanalytic explanation centres upon the question of early childhood training: culturally variable ways of handling and stimulating the child map on to its body and emergent psyche the patterns of allowable and non-allowable eroticism and subject-positions, shaping it to fit in with prevailing cultural norms of sublimation and repression. However, this approach, which was taken up by Margaret Mead, seems inadequate for multicultural societies, where certain irrationalities become hegemonic despite differing childrearing practices. One modification of traditional psychoanalytic theory that can make it more helpful for cultural studies is the notion that the cultural formation of the unconscious does not end with childhood, but continues throughout our life. Research along this line includes studies of the particular language, metaphors and erotic displacements cultivated in specific institutional and disciplinary sites to secure people’s unconscious investment in specific cultural practices. Sally Hacker’s (1989, 1990) sociologically based studies of pleasure and power in the training of engineers; Valerie Walkerdine’s (1981) research into desire and displacement in classroom practice; Sharon Traweek’s (1988) and Carol Cohn’s (1987) investigations of the culture of high energy physics and nuclear defense intellectuals respectively all represent significant contributions in this arena. I believe we could also develop a more historical (and possibly comparative) approach by adapting the notion of the ‘potentially universal symbol’ from the psychoanalytic anthropologist Gèza Róheim. The basic idea is that a particular symbol or symptom can crop up in the individual lives and dreams of people in any culture with potentially the same meaning (e.g., the snake as a symbol of fertility), but that its precise meaning will be inflected according to the particular cultural context of the dreamer; also, that the range

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and type of symbols taken up by a culture will be subject to historical variations (Róheim, 1950/68:22). Correlatively, I would suggest, of the wide and individually diverse range of symbols and symptoms manifested by a population—with or without common childrearing practices—a culture will pick up on, repeat and reinscribe those symbols and symptoms that accord with dominant interests. Money and time will be invested into stories, films, artworks, and technologies whose metaphorical messages reproduce constellations of desire that sustain hegemonic patterns of production and consumption.14 Studies of poetic special-effects images and sequences can also reveal close connections between techno-myth and metaphors from the history of Western philosophy (especially, of course, vision, enlightenment, irradiation).15 So like individual dreams, these collective mythic productions are multilayered in their associations. And like the interpreter of dreams, the psychoanalyst of culture must probe this polysemy as a way to decipher the often quite clear—but not always admissible—logic of ‘latent dream thoughts’, the loves, cruelties, and perversions that have been institutionalized as cultural norms. What I am outlining then is a form of psychoanalytic cultural studies that takes as its principal task deciphering the logic of myth and sublimation (where my particular interest is in the hegemonic irrationalities associated with technology). While there would certainly be some (though possibly a quite weak) causal connection between individual development and the cultural unconscious, the value of psychoanalytic case studies of individuals is primarily to serve as heuristic devices for learning to recognize constellations of symbols/desires in cultural texts. A danger lurking here is that cultural theorists—especially those not exposed to the idiosyncrasies and infinite variability of psychological formations through daily professional or clinical analytic practice—will seize on to certain psychoanalytic metanarratives (e.g., accounts of the Oedipus complex, normative models of gendered psychology, the Mirror Phase, etc.) and impose these as grids upon almost any material, where needless to say the same story is always confirmed, and anything that doesn’t fit the model appears as a troubling ambiguity.16 The psychoanalytic critic has to remain open to the variations and transformations in particular texts; reading case studies whose features have not been canonized into psychoanalytic orthodoxies or meta-narratives is a helpful assistance to this. In any event, merely identifying the infantile prototypes of a mythic formation is only the beginning of a cultural analysis. The critical/political step is to correlate these metaphorical meanings to the historical, institutional, and geopolitical circumstances of their arising.17 This perspective on culture allows one to ask questions about sublimation of the kind Foucault r aised about the distribution of pleasures: what kinds of perversions are sublimated, and into what arenas? More importantly, whose? Whose perversions and sublimations are confined to the bedroom or desk drawer and whose attract megabucks and circulate publicly? Who gets the time

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and support (e.g., financial, emotional and domestic) to go off for professional training to occupy the most creative and satisfying jobs, and who gets stuck with the shitwork at both paid and domestic workplaces: who cultures the brainchildren and who enculturates the bodychildren? Freud suggested at one point that women have less capacity for sublimation than men. However, it may be that women have less need for sublimation (e.g., childbirth fantasies can be fulfilled directly). More importantly for cultural studies, entanglement with actual children allows women less opportunity than men for transforming their/our fantasies into cultural production, even where such obstacles could be overcome (e.g., through birth control or child care). A study by Susan Stanford Friedman (1987) of women poets and writers suggests that like men inventors, some women also imagine cultural production by analogy with childbirth; further studies might investigate oral and sadistic images, or examine the awkward question of the extent to which feminine cultural fantasies also answered anatomical deficiencies with sublimated fulfilments: the dreaded penisenvy! Along other lines, future research could compare Western sublimations with other cultures’ mythic and technological formations; of particular interest to feminists would be the practices within cultures that legitimated allfemale sites of cultural production: ‘women’s business’. Another possibility that intrigues this writer is that of using the graphic, visceral and infantile terms of psychoanalysis to represent and critique Western hegemony (e.g., of thought and technology) in a form that can be translated across cultures: the language of myth. Then instead of appearing as an unquestionably rational and almost divine technological imperative, Westernization could be understood and critiqued as the attempt to institutionalize certain bizarre fantasies. Indeed, members of indigenous cultures do not need Western psychoanalytic theorists to make such analyses: to those not yet alienated from the erotic wellsprings of cultural practices the sadistically raping, greedily devouring, irresponsibly waste-full perversions of Western land usages are all too apparent, and readily contrasted with the more loving, reparative and caring approaches adopted by people unafraid of acknowledging the land as mother, origin, source. As a final example of how the shifts in analytic focus I’m proposing might be applied in the interpretation of cultural texts, I would like to discuss another selection from Body/Politics, an essay by historian and philosopher of science Evelyn Fox Keller (1990) on the scientific quest for secrets and associated excremental and reproductive (or fetal/fecal) imagery in twentiethcentury science. Gender, technology and reproduction in Western culture The quest for secrets of animation and extermination amongst all-male sacred/ secret societies is a key theme in Evelyn Fox Keller’s essay ‘From secrets of

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life to secrets of death’. Keller writes, as I also claim to do, in the spirit of what she calls ‘the old psychoanalysis’, one faithful to Freud’s project to ‘restore for us the connection between body and mind that Descartes had severed’ (1990:177). Her general argument is that the scientific motif of the urge to f athom the secrets of nature is double-sided and involves, on the one hand, discovering the secrets of women, nature, of life itself; on the other, the search for mastery over and possession of instruments of death. Traditionally, the secrets of life have been women’s business, but in science, men pursue the illumination or enlightenment of the female interior (metaphorical and actual) and aim to undo or unravel nature’s secrets. Keller discusses two main examples: the ‘calculated assault on the secrets of life’ in research on DNA in molecular biology, and the similarly concentrated search for ‘the secrets of death’ in the making of the first nuclear bomb in the Manhattan project. The latter involved a highly secret production of a supremely deadly machine that was described throughout in terms of gestation, and birth metaphors, as documented in Brian Easlea’s book Fathering the Unthinkable. Keller highlights the exclusivity of masculine secret cults, comparing bullroarer rituals with male research teams: Not unlike the initiation rites of the bullroarer, modern-day weapons research is generally conducted in labs that are overwhelmingly (if not exclusively) male, and highly secretive; also like the bullroarer, the bombs that are produced are likely to be associated with a provocative mix of phallic and birth imagery (1990:186). She links various stories and examples together through the concept of wombenvy, and stresses the envy, for whether the story is one of anal production of a bullroarer and/or the rebirth of a new male initiate from the company of men, or is about the supposed light-and life-giving properties of the mind (as in photocentric philosophy), women’s life-giving powers are denied or in some sense ‘spoiled’. I’m sympathetic to Keller’s general point here, which also connects with questions about the distribution of sublimations: masculine cultural (re) productivity may be achieved at the symbolic (and actual) expense of women’s productive powers. Perhaps because Keller is working with historical examples of technoscientific invention and outside the strictures of the ‘sexual difference’ model of representation, she has a better sense than Doane of the multivalence and bisexuality of sublimated masculine desires. My critique of Keller therefore proceeds along other lines. I suggest that her treatment of cross-cultural material is an example of the kind of falsely universal, ethnocentric, and ahistorical psychoanalytic framework that would lead some theorists of culture to reject psychoanalysis as a counter-hegemonic tool.

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Whereas I have criticized Doane for making slipshod equations on the side of the feminine, I’d criticize Keller’s interpretation of science for doing something similar with the notion of masculinity. Keller cites cross-cultural examples of dif f erent expressions of womb-envy, but then erases the cultural differences by describing them all as instances of some generalized ‘masculinity’. Keller’s work is representative of a rhetorical strategy common amongst ecofeminists, who often phrase critical interpretive statements about Western technoscience in terms of some generalized masculinity or phallicism. Throughout Keller’s paper (and other ecofeminist writings), masculinity is almost always associated with the technological, the paternal and, most consistently, with death. For example, citing Carol Cohn’s (1987) fieldwork on the language of nuclear weapons designers and strategists, Keller outlines how the language of reproduction and family life replaces flesh and blood referents with macabre high-tech substitutes whose lethal potentials thus become obscured. Once weapons are spoken of as beings living in their own strange world, they become thinkable as magically separate from the real human flesh that would be irradiated and wasted by the ‘orgasmic wumps’ and ‘footprints’ produced when these sexy weapons and systems ‘take out’, ‘couple’ or ‘marry’ each other (Keller, 1990:188). Drawing on Kleinian theory, Keller suggests that such language maintains the destructive tendencies it masks by ‘foreclosing the normal processes of integration and reparation’. By contrast, from my interpretation of Klein (and Róheim), through which I understand the technological brainchild as a token of reparation (i.e., a new body fashioned from the remains of the damaged maternal body), I would suggest that what makes nuclear language so powerful is the way it actually incorporates the process of reparation: through the bomb=baby equation, the destroyers of bodies are imagined as new bodies in themselves: they simultaneously destroy and make reparation for their destruction—a magical coupling of opposites indeed. But the main point I would wish to make is this: that the ‘diagnosis’ of womb-envy, however iconoclastic and unsettling it might be to some, is not in and of itself a radical or subversive one. Indeed, it is not a diagnosis at all, but an identification of a symptom. A too-smooth slippage from one masculine cult’s expressions of womb-envy to another can lead the critic to overlook what is distinctive about Western/nuclear/science-fiction culture. For the historical and environmental evidence is clear that despite the widespread occurrence of masculine cults that deploy fantasy and ritual objects to supplement men’s anatomical deficiencies in the reproductive department, while celebrating various forms of ‘mastery of death’, most traditional and non-Western cultures did not conjoin womb-envy with exterminist technologies and practices. In Róheim’s terms, womb-envy, phallic and anal pregnancies, etc., would be examples of potentially universal symbols, that is symbols which human

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biology and terrestrial experience made likely to occur in dreams of fantasies. However, the psychoanalysis of cultural formations is only partly complete when it identifies such a constellation as womb-envy: the next, and possibly more interesting set of questions might include: how, where, and with what degrees of displacement are these fantasies played out in a particular cultural context? Exactly what other kinds of desires and organ-metaphors are associated with this symbolic nexus? And what else is it about the culture, the geography, the history, the religious and philosophical associations, its mode of governance, its organizations of subsistence and production, its kinship structures and divisions of labour that have determined the particular mode of expression of womb-envy (or whatever…)? Along these lines, questions of scale and arena would be crucial. Though there may be essential similarities in symbolic associations, a tribal masculine initiation cult is not the same as a weapons lab: the gender formation may be similar, but the political economic context is quite different, and the technology is of frighteningly different genre and magnitude. One is enacted directly with and upon the bodies of those involved, often with a good deal of explicitness about the character of the masculine envy and reproductive desire entailed; the other transpires in the name of ‘rational’ and ‘objective’ science within a highly industrialized global war apparatus with effects on the bodies of beings far displaced in space and time from the weapons designers. In principle, then, the psychoanalysis of cultural formations must pay attention to their technological and philosophical as well as sexual genres. Characteristically, Western technological development has also been greatly facilitated by military concerns: war its spur, speed its principle. Also characteristic of hegemonic culture is the emphasis on metaphors of vision and light. Irigaray considers Western philosophy as photology, a lightcentred metaphysics where truth is revelation, illumination, enlightenment, where knowledge becomes, as Keller writes, a ‘drama of visibility and invisibility’. This light-centredness flowers in nuclear technologies, where matter is renatured ‘brighter than a thousand suns’, converted into energy and light. But even in ‘conventional’ (i.e., short of nuclear) twentieth-century war, photocentrism becomes a predominant organizing principle, almost undermining war’s traditional concern with territory. These developments are charted in Virilio’s (1989) study of the cinematization of war, from the reconnaissance photos, radar and flight films of modern war (e.g., World War II), to the virtual reality of an almost entirely visually and/or computermediated postmodern War (e.g., the Gulf War). 18 Read against this broader context, moments fetishizing vision and visual technologies in cinema are not (as Mulveyan theory would have it) distractions from a knowledge-seeking narrative about sexual difference, but direct indicators of the photological interests institutionalized throughout Western culture, where cinema and nukes are both examples of uncanny half-lives reborn as light. This is not the place to elaborate on these connections, but to simply note that a

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comprehensive psychoanalytic study of Western culture would need to specify ‘masculinity’ and masculine sublimations with reference to such tendencies as photocentrism and an increasingly ‘high’ (even extraterrestrial) military technology.19 Despite her professed allegiance to ‘the old psychoanalysis’, Keller is timid about claiming any causal connections between individual and collective unconscious formations. To home in on Keller’s final paragraph: Surely, the fantasies I describe can neither be seen as causal (in any primary sense) nor as inconsequential. Where then, between causal and inconsequential, are we to place the role of such fantasies? […] fantasies that are in one sense private, but at the same time collectively reinforced, even exploited, by collateral interests. What is their role in the dynamics of the overtly (and primarily) public and political crisis we find ourselves in? (1990:189). This passage raises questions about the status of psychoanalytic interpretation and about the status of the fantasies identified thereby. Keller spells out in unusually clear terms the impossible position into which psychoanalytic cultural criticism seems to have been forced in recent years. There’s an incredible reticence about claiming that psychoanalytic interpretations have any real relevance for cultural theory. As Keller puts it, unconscious fantasies are neither causal (i.e., having consequences) nor inconsequential (i.e., being a cause). In such a situation, a critic may resign herself to the bewildered contemplation of astounding parallels between the symbolic associations of Western cultural formations and the materials collected from individual case histories (or from other cultures), invoking words like ‘resonance’ or ‘curious similarity’ while disclaiming any more specific connection. However as I have already outlined, the psychoanalytic perspective forwarded in the present essay posits the ‘strange attractors’ of myth as mediators between the individual and the collective unconscious and expects to find resonances, which arise because hegemonic irrationalities present specific versions of potentially universal symbols, or because individuals supply the erotic and perverse associations to collectively valued artefacts and poetic representations. It is not in the interests of technoscience or of capitalism to pursue these lines of inquiry. If anyone knows of corporations of fering research grants for the study of masculine technological perversions, let me know about it! The leaders of Western culture have spent much effort trying to convince their own and other populations of the purposive, nonmystical, efficient, practical, and above all masculine and rational character of the Western way of life and its associated technologies, commodities, and values; the psychoanalysis of culture can expose and help delegitimize the profound irrationality of these enterprises. And needless to say, we cannot expect the ruling men to simply

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declare these interests: irrationality, envy, senses of lack, fears of abandonment, and fetishistic attachment to objects are, after all, supposedly definitive of the female psyche, and simply don’t fit available ideological definitions of masculinity. Keller poses the question of sublimation in terms of the dichotomies of public and private, individual and collective, suggesting a process of collective reinforcement of private fantasies. My hunch is that the public/ private dichotomy is a misleading basis for an account of sublimation, and that more intermediate terms may be needed to account for slippages between the individual and the technoscientific unconscious. From my readings of Keller, Hacker, Cohn, and Sherry Turkle (1984) (the latter on computer users), I gather that the kinds of joking play and metaphors which express these fantasies don’t circulate so much in broad and highly public official fora, but in smaller, more informal and semipublic gatherings and spaces. For example, the research literature on girls and computers suggests that where semipublic spaces like video-games halls give boys opportunities to familiarize themselves with computer and simulations technology, girls’ lack of access to such spaces is one of the factors inhibiting their classroom engagement with computers (see, e.g., Kiesler, Sproul, Eccles, 1985; Griffiths, 1988). My suspicion is that the general lack of culturally legitimated, nondomestic spaces where girls and women can pursue collective political, social, artistic, or technological f orms of creativity—that is, sublimate feminine perversions—is one of the defining features of sublimation in the West, where since the burning times, male-dominated culture has viewed almost any kind of female group activity with paranoia and/or defensive ridicule and trivialization. An odd thing about the kind of psychoanalytic interpretation Keller performs is the way it overtly recognizes the power of irrational desires and images in the technoscientific cult, but covertly cleaves to a rationalist framework. The implicit assumption is that somehow mere revelation of men’s eroticinvestments in technological creation—making the unconscious conscious—will be enough to ‘cure’ the cultural pathology, perhaps by shaming the technofetishists to retreat back into the Cartesian grid of reason. Within this rationalist framework, cause and effect is usually understood in terms of Newtonian, ballistic and linear sequences (as in the communications model of a sender firing a message that impacts on a receiver). To a rationalist, the causality implied by psychoanalytic interpretation is entirely puzzling, because it is not about the sequence of observable events amongst elements in a field. Instead, it describes the latent investments and forces that shape the field. The mythic and unconscious dimensions of culture provide the background pre-understanding or the horizon of sense within which events in the field are perceived or enacted. I would propose we stick with the psychoanalytic perspective and assume that

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unconscious and mythic elements—simply speaking, poetic thought—are an irreducible part of any cultural activity, including the most rational(ized). The task of psychoanalytic cultural criticism could not then be to eradicate or suppress irrationality with the enlightening force of reason, but to work with the plasticity of desire and representation: to transform, modulate, and displace along different and less dangerous paths the fantasies and metaphors that inform cultural practices; or more simply, to pay critical attention to the mythic aspects of non-dominant or emergent cultural productions. For in escaping a suffocating structuralism and the ‘always already’ of sexual difference, a repoliticized psychoanalytic cultural critique not only offers to enhance our appreciation of the historical specificity of Western myth and sublimation, it also invites us to actively direct our efforts towards forging (or revaluing) counter-hegemonic irrationalities—such as a poetics of life diversified in futurity—which in their turn become the organizers of different cultural practices and new regimes of common sense. Notes 1 Freud, 1908, ‘Creative writers and day-dreaming’, Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (SE) 9:143; Pelican Freud Library: 14,129. 2 I’m referring mainly to lectures in the School of Humanities at Murdoch University, especially in the course ‘Language, Culture and the Unconscious’; some of these analyses appear in Robert Hodge and Gunther Kress (1988); see pp. 58–9 for one statement of this general principle. 3 Here, I bring in a semiotic distinction between ‘ideology’ as level of signification that works with fixed, recognized and often binary categories (culture/nature, woman/man, ruling class/lower class, etc.), and ‘mythology’, a signification that involves more of what Freud called ‘primary process thinking’—more fluid, not necessarily verbal, metaphorical and multilayered. This distinction is a development of the theories of mythic symbolism in relation to social categories elaborated by Mary Douglas (1966); see especially chapter 2 and chapter 6 on the ways meditation on anomalous figures (i.e., what I’m calling ‘the mythic’) can both support and call into question the (‘ideological’) binaries of normal classificatory schemata. 4 A caveat here would be that there are aspects of myth that seem transhistorical, a point I would not feel comfortable about belabouring in a cultural studies context, where the more interesting question is how those transhistorical aspects are mediated in culturally and historically specific ways. 5 Lacan’s doctoral work was very much influenced by Klein, and while his early works acknowledge Klein’s influences, his references to Kleinian theory grew more disparaging over time. Compare, for example, his positive references to Klein in the 1948 paper ‘Aggressivity in psychoanalysis’ with his disparagement of her in the 1958 ‘The direction of the treatment and the principles of its power’; both essays in Lacan (1977).

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6 These ideas come up in Freud’s general writings on culture and religion, such as 1913 Totem and Taboo, S.E. 13, 1; 1921 Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, S.E. 18, 69; 1927, The Future of an Illusion, S.E. 21:3; 1930, Civilization and Its Discontents, S.E. 21:59. A more subtle philosophical account of the structure of sublimation within an androcentric and photocentric cultural context is given in Irigaray’s mediations on the poetics and related erotic processes involved in Plato’s Cave metaphor, including the mining, appropriation and illumination of the mother/ Earth; estampage—the deceitful stealing and phallic stamping of the re-sourced mater(ial); and a specular economy that includes sodomistic ocular incorporation, and the ideal of an ex-orbital solar vision. Luce Irigaray (1985). 7 These include Klein’s own analyses of artworks, and her discussions of epistemophilic (knowledge-seeking) impulses and the femininity complex of boys, which suggested that envy of feminine reproductive and nutritive organs prompted desires to sadistically appropriate and consume the maternal body, followed by reparative efforts to restore it or emulate it through the creation of a new whole body—the artwork or technological brainchild. Many people, including Ella Sharpe, James Strachey, Edward Glover and Paula Heinmann, explored these ideas, which resurfaced more recently in Peter Fuller’s aesthetic theories elaborated in his Art and Psychoanalysis (1980). For a recent account of sublimation which accords with my own political perspective, see Stephen Robinson (1984). Occasional articles on sublimation may be found in journals of criticism and theory over the past two decades; my point is not that they are absent, but that issues around sublimation have not yet been adopted as central guides to psychoanalytic criticism to the same degree as the more ideologically convenient models of gendered identity in culture. 8 Freud, 1908, ‘“Civilized” sexual morality and modern nervous illness’, S.E. 9:189. The forces that can be employed for cultural activities are thus to a great extent obtained through the suppression of what are known as the perverse elements of sexual excitation’. 9 This notion, suggested by Abraham and developed by Klein, is a problematic one for hard-line Freudians. It implies that the phallus acquires its value not as a purely masculine symbol of paternal potency, language and law, but is initially desired as a magical substitute for the breast. It required special treatment by Lacan, who allowed that the phallus was a ‘signifier of lack’, but avoided specifying an answer to the question ‘lack of what?’. Instead of being a signifier of (the lack of) the breast, the phallus becomes in Lacan’s algebra a signifier of its own lack: the solitary sign of sexual—or indeed of any significatory—difference. For preLacanian sources see Karl Abraham (1966); especially the essays ‘Origins and growth of object love’ and ‘The influence of oral eroticism on character formation’; and Melanie Klein, The Oedipus complex in the light of early anxieties’ in Klein (1948), esp. p. 382, and other indexed references to ‘father’s penis’; and Klein, ‘Weaning’ and The early development of conscience in the child’ (1975). 10 Jacqueline Rose helpfully alerts us to the dangers of this conflation in her essay ‘Femininity and its discontents’ in Rose (1986), esp. pp. 88–93. 11 On alienation, escape, and visual culture see Robert D.Romanyshyn (1989); on technological cocoons see Don Ihde (1990), esp. p. 110.

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12 The political and social structures that simultaneously permit individual morality and collective amorality are explored in C.Fred Alford (1989). 13 The tendency to slip between the figure of the woman and the technological feminine may also be discerned in Barbara Creed’s (1986) analysis of maternal monstrosity in Aliens, cited by Doane (1990). 14 Close scrutiny of science-fiction film credits often reveals the involvement of many corporate and government agencies, including NASA and the US Department of Defense. I would not want to suggest this involvement implies a direct propagandistic control of the image; rather—and this is another topic for further research—that opportunities exist for the inventors of both real and cinematic ‘special effects’ to collaborate and reinforce each other’s technofetishes. 15 Some of these are explored in my doctoral thesis, Through the Lumen: Frankenstein and the Optics of Re-Origination, Ph.D. diss., University of California, Santa Cruz, 1988. A condensed version of some of this appeared in 1991 in the Melbourne magazine Agenda, 19:13–15. 16 A similar critique of the ‘self-fulfilling’ character of Doane’s ‘sexual difference’ model is made by Jenny Taylor (1991), esp. p. 108. 17 The narratives, scenarios and dialogue of texts—corresponding to the ‘secondary revision’ of individual dreams—usually give obvious pointers to these contexts. For example, the opening sequence of the science-fiction horror film Alien, about a suffocating/raping extraterrestrial penis-breast monster that grows up into a cannibalistic biomechanical penis dentatus, provides one indicator to the historical thematic (the cultural equivalent of what Freud called the ‘day’s residues’ incorporated into dream) in the written statement that the ship Nostromo was carrying a cargo of ore from extraterrestrial mining operations. From this (and a number of other textual indicators) we can read Alien as a story about the search for resources, and the kinds of erotic/sadistic interests sublimated into the transformation of resources into deadly but lifelike technologies. 18 The last chapter accurately describes the videology of the Gulf War before it happened. The term ‘postmodern war’ comes from Chris Gray’s qualifying essay ‘Artificial intelligence and read postmodern war’, History of Consciousness, University of California, Santa Cruz, 1988, typescript. 19 For a condensed, but highly coherent survey of some of the tendencies and formations that need to be examined in feminist culture and communications theory, see Sue Curry Jansen (1989).

References Abraham, Karl (1966) On Character and Libido Development, New York: Norton. Alford, C.Fred (1989) Melanie Klein and Critical Social Theory, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Burgin, Victor, Donald, James, and Kaplan, Cora (1986) editors, Formations of Fantasy, London: Methuen. Butler, Judith (1990) ‘Gender trouble, feminist theory, and psychoanalytic discourse’, in Nicholson, L., editor, Feminism/Postmodernism, New York: Routledge, 324–40. Cohn, Carol (1987) ‘Sex and death in the rational world of defense intellectuals’, Signs, 12 (4), 687–718.

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Creed, Barbara (1986) ‘Horror and the monstrous feminine: an imaginary abjection’, Screen, 27(1), 44–71. Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix (1983) Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ——(1988) A Thousand Plateaus, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Doane, Mary Ann (1990) ‘Technophilia: technology, representation, and the feminine’, in Jacobus, Keller and Shuttleworth (1990). Douglas, Mary (1966) Purity and Danger, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Easlea, Brian (1983) Fathering the Unthinkable: Masculinity, Scientists, and Nuclear Arms Race, London: Pluto. Friedman, Susan Stanford (1987) ‘Creativity and the childbirth metaphor: gender difference in literary discourses’, Feminist Studies, 13(1), 48–82. Freud, Sigmund (1908) ‘Creative writers and day-dreaming’, Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud 9. Fuller, Peter (1980) Art and Psychoanalysis, London: Writers and Readers. Griffiths, Morwenna (1988) ‘Strong feelings about computers’, Women’s Studies International Forum, 11 (2). Hacker, Sally (1989) Pleasure, Power and Technology: Some Tales of Gender, Engineering, and the Cooperative Workplace, Boston: Unwin Hyman. ——(1990) Doing It the Hard Way: Investigations of Gender and Technology, in Smith, Dorothy and Turner, Susan M., editors, Boston: Unwin Hyman. Hodge, Robert, and Kress, Gunther (1988) Social Semiotics, Oxford: Blackwell/ Polity. Ihde, Don (1990) Technology and the Lifeworld: From Garden to Earth, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Irigaray, Luce (1985) ‘Plato’s Hystera’, in her Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. Gillian C.Gill, Ithaca (NY): Cornell University Press [Paris: 1974], 243–364. Jacobus, Mary, Keller, Evelyn Fox and Shuttleworth, Sally (1990) editors, Body/ Politics: Women and the Discourses of Science, New York: Routledge, 163–76. Jansen, Sue Curry (1989) ‘Gender and the information society: a socially structured silence’, Journal of Communication 39(3), 196–215. Keller, Evelyn Fox (1990) ‘From secrets of life to secrets of death’, in Jacobus, Keller, and Shuttleworth (1990). Kiesler, Sara, Sproul, Lee and Eccles, Jacquelynne (1985) ‘Pool halls, chips, and war games: women in the culture of computing’, Psychology of Women Quarterly, 9, 451–62. Klein, Melanie (1948) Contributions to Psychoanalysis, London: Hogarth. ——(1975) Love, Guilt and Reparation and Other Works 1921–1945, London: Hogarth. Lacan, Jacques (1977) Ecrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan, editor, New York: Norton. Penley, Constance (1989) ‘Feminism, film theory and the bachelor machines’, in her The Future of an Illusion, London: Routledge. Robinson Stephen (1984) ‘The parent to the child’, in Richards, Barry, editor, Capitalism and Infancy: Essays on Psychoanalysis and Politics, London: Free Association Books, 167–206. Róheim, Gèza (1943) The Origins and Functions of Culture, New York: Nervous and Mental Diseases Monographs. ——(1950/68) Psychoanalysis and Anthropology, New York: International University Press.

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Romanyshyn, Robert D. (1989) Technology as Symptom and Dream, London: Routledge. Rose, Jacqueline (1986) Sexuality in the Field of Vision, London: Verso. Taylor, Jenny (1991) ‘Dreams of a common language: science, gender and culture’, New Formations, 13, 103–11. Traweek, Sharon (1988) Beamtimes and Lifetimes: The World of High Energy Physics, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Turkle, Sherry (1984) The Second Self, New York: Simon & Schuster. Virilio, Paul (1986) Speed and Politics: An Essay on Dromology, trans. Mark Polizotti. New York: Semiotext(e). ——(1989) War and Cinema, trans. Patrick Camiller, London: Verso. Virilio, Paul and Lotringer, Sylvere (1983) Pure War, trans. Mark Polizotti, New York: Semiotext(e). Walkerdine, Valerie (1981) The Mastery of Reason: Cognitive Development and the Production of Rationality, London: Routledge. ——(1986) ‘Video replay: families, films and fantasy’, in Burgin, Donald and Kaplan, editors (1986) 167–99). ——(1990) Schoolgirl Fictions, London/NY: Verso.

TONY BENNETT

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To work with a government implies neither subjection nor global acceptance. One can simultaneously work and be restive. I even think that the two go together. (Foucault) It is useful, in the context of the so-called ‘policy debate’ in cultural studies, to call to mind Foucault’s contention that—as Colin Gordon summarizes it— a governmental logic of and for the left ought to be possible, ‘involving a way for the governed to work with government, without any assumption of compliance or complicity, on actual and common problems’ (1991:48). For, predictably enough, the mere mention of terms like ‘government’ and ‘policy’ in connection with cultural studies sparks of f in some a yearning for a moment of pure politics—a return to 1968—in whose name any traffic with the domain of government can be written off as a sell-out. Something of this was evident in Helen Grace’s (1991) review of the Australian cultural studies conference held at the University of Western Sydney in December 1990, and especially in the oppositions which organize the discursive strategy of that review in, on the one hand, linking the turn to policy with pragmatically driven research and a yearning for money and power while, on the other, ranging against these an uncontaminated holy trinity of theory, scholarship and textual analysis. My principal concern here, then, is to suggest that viewing ‘the policy debate’ through the prism of such oppositions runs the risk of distorting the issues that are at stake in that debate.1 These, I want to argue, do not take the form of a generalized choice between theory on the one hand and policy on the other, or between textual analysis and pragmatically oriented research. Rather, they take the form of a choice between different bodies and styles of theory, between different ways of construing the relations between theoretical and pragmatic concerns, and between different kinds of textual analysis and their associated estimations of the issues at stake in the conduct of such analysis.

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This is not intended, however, as a way of pulling the policy punch, or of seeking to legitimize policy work by claiming that it, too, can lay claim to a stock of theoretical credentials of its own. Nor is it intended as a pluralist argument for relations of peaceful coexistence with other styles, paradigms or tendencies within cultural studies. This is not to suggest that all work within cultural studies (however we might want to define it) should or need be directly concerned with policy matters. What it is to suggest is that all such work is indirectly affected by policy issues and horizons. This being so, my contention is that recognition of this would, and should, make a considerable difference to the manner in which the concerns of cultural studies are broached and conceptualized as well as to the political styles and dispositions governing the ways in which work in the field is conducted and the constituencies to which it is addressed. In these respects, my presentation takes its bearings from Stuart Cunningham’s (1991) contention that the incorporation of an adequate and thorough-going policy orientation into cultural studies would see a shift in its ‘command metaphors away from rhetorics of resistance, progressiveness, and anti-commercialism on the one hand, and populism on the other, toward those of access, equity, empowerment and the divination of opportunities to exercise appropriate cultural leadership’.2 Such a project, Cunningham argues, enjoins a far-reaching theoretical revisionism that ‘would necessitate rethinking the component parts of the field from the ground up’. It is to this task that I wish to contribute here by reviewing—and suggesting alternatives to— the concepts of culture which have subtended the cultural studies enterprise.3 Histories of culture This is a timely undertaking. In Politics and Letters, Williams claimed that his motives in writing Culture and Society were mainly oppositional. His aim, he wrote, was ‘to counter the appropriation of a long line of thinking about culture to what were by now decisively reactionary positions’ rather than ‘to found a new position’ (1979:97–8). There can be little doubt that this work proved to be decisively enabling for the subsequent development of cultural studies in the new views and definitions of culture it helped establish. The limitations of the new definitional horizons Williams thus opened up, however, are becoming increasingly apparent. The respects in which Williams’s concept of culture as a ‘whole way of life’ is connected to a Romantic conception of historical process as one destined to restore us to the communal ways of living from which it has allegedly rent us asunder have already been commented on (see Hunter, 1988). So, too, have the respects in which his enthusiasm for the historical restitution of community rests on an over-sentimental attachment to the patriarchal forms of Welsh working-class culture (see Jardine and Swindells, 1989). Here, then, I shall seek to add to these perspectives by focusing on the

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limitations of the kind of historical account Williams of fers of the evolution of the range of meanings associated with ‘culture’ in its modern usage. These limitations are not ones of error; rather, they are ones of implication. I do not, that is to say, wish to question Williams’s reading of the line of descent from Coleridge and Newman to Arnold and thence to Leavis. What I do want to question, however, is the assumption—largely taken on trust within cultural studies—that an adequate definition of culture can be derived from such an analysis. In tracing the emergence of the selective definition of culture, understood as a standard of achieved perfection, Williams offers an account of its functioning as a key term in modern forms of social critique and commentary. Important though this is, there are limits to the conclusions that can be derived from such a history. In particular, there are no good reasons to suppose that such semantic shifts can be regarded as anything but symptomatic of the concurrent changes affecting the organization and social functioning of those practices which fall within the category of culture so defined. Or, to put this another way: the changing definitional contours of ‘culture’ comprise merely a part of the changing set of relations in which, in the period since the late eighteenth century, cultural forms and activities have come to be implicated. Viewed in this light, I want to suggest, the transformations we should take most note of concern less the changing semantic fortunes of ‘culture’, particularly as manifested in its development into a standard of achieved perfection, than the role which such developments played in relation to the emergence of the wider domain of ‘the cultural’ as a field of social management. This, then, is the nature of the revisionism I wish to propose, one in which the distinctiveness of culture—in its modern forms—is sought less in the specificity of its practices than in the specificity of the governmental tasks and programmes in which those practices come to be inscribed. By ‘governmental’ here, I should stress, I do not mean ‘of or pertaining to the state’. Rather, I have in mind the much broader conception of the governmentalization of social relations—that is, the management of populations by means of specific knowledges, programmes and technologies —which, according to Foucault, most clearly distinguishes modern forms of social regulation from their predecessors. An adequate genealogy of modern culture, I want to suggest, needs to take more account of culture’s practical deployment within such governmental processes than previous accounts have been wont to. The perspectives I shall draw on in support of this argument are derived from work-in-progress on the early history of the public museum and, in the British context, the rational recreations movement. These provide some rough and ready co-ordinates for a history of culture which focuses on the manner in which the practices that are so described have come to be rendered useful by being harnessed to governmental programmes aimed at transforming the attributes—mental and behavioural—of extended populations. Such a history

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would, of course, be quite different from the more familiar ones within cultural studies in that it would take its bearings from the changing forms and contexts of culture’s governmental and administrative utilization rather than from its shifting semantic horizons. It is a history, moreover, written in the institutional arrangements and programmes developed by cultural administrators like Henry Cole—the architect of the Great Exhibition and of London’s South Kensington museum complex—rather than, as Williams proposed, one contained in the texts of cultural critics. And it is a history, finally, in which policy—which, in its broad sense, I define as the governmental utilization of culture for specific ends—would appear not as an optional add-on but as central to the definition and constitution of culture and so also, therefore, equally central to the concerns of cultural studies. There is no space, here, to do more than sketch the contours of such a history. In doing so, however, I shall try to demonstrate how the arguments advanced so far undermine the intelligibility of a polarity between, on the one hand, theory, politics and textual analysis and, on the other, an unprincipled, policy-oriented pragmatism. I shall do so by means of three provocations. First, I shall seek to show how a stress on the governmental utilization of culture can suggest new approaches to some of the perennial theoretical problems and concerns of cultural studies. My contention in this regard will be that the emergence of the modern relations between high and popular culture can be viewed as an artefact of government in view of the degree to which the former was—and still is—subjected to a governmental technologization or instrumentalization in order to render it useful as a means of social management. Second, I shall endeavour to show how acknowledging the intrinsically governmental constitution of modern culture undermines the logic of a cultural politics of resistance or opposition to some generalized source of cultural domination. I shall suggest that, to the contrary, modern forms of cultural politics often have their origins and raision d’être in the governmentalization of culture: that is, that the objectives to which they are committed are a by-product of the governmental uses to which specific forms of culture have been put just as those objectives can only be met via modifications to existing governmental programmes or the development of new ones. My third provocation will be to suggest that the ends toward which textual analysis is directed, the means by which such analysis is conducted and the political issues which hinge on its pursuit are an effect of the ways in which specific regions of culture (literature, art) have been instrumentalized via their inscription within particular governmental cultural technologies or apparatuses. Culture and power As good a way as any of broaching these various issues is to suggest that cultural studies might usefully review its understanding of the relations

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between culture and power in the light of Foucault’s critique of juridicodiscursive conceptions of power. The main burden of Foucault’s critique, it will be recalled, is that Western political thought, up to and including Marxist theories of the state, has proved incapable of recognizing the capillary network of power relations associated with the development of modern forms of government because it still envisages power, on the model of its monarchical form, as emanating from a single source. The primary concern of political theory has accordingly been to specify how limits might be placed on the exercise of such power or to identify sources external to it from which it might be opposed. To cut off the king’s head in political theory, Foucault argues, means ‘that we should direct our researches on the nature of power not towards the juridical edifice of sovereignty, the state apparatuses and the ideologies which accompany them, but towards domination and the material operators of power, towards forms of subjection and the inflections and utilizations of their localized systems, and towards strategic apparatuses’ (1980:102). It also means, he argues, that we should forsake looking for a source outside power from which it might be opposed and seek instead to identify the differentiated forms of resistance which the exercise of power— through multiple and dispersed networks of relations—itself generates. Many of the views regarding the relations between culture and power still current within cultural studies suggest that an equivalent cutting off of the king’s head has yet to take place. While the dominant ideology thesis has few remaining supporters, the perspective of cultural hegemony which—by and large—has replaced that thesis remains committed to a juridico-discursive conception of power in its deployment of what Foucault calls a descending analysis of power which, in positing a centre of and for power, then aims to trace the means by which that power percolates down through the social structure so as to reproduce itself in its molecular elements. It is true that, in its more sophisticated variants, this perspective stresses the negotiated nature of this process: that is, that power is never exercised without encountering sources of opposition to which it is obliged to make concessions so that what is consented to is always a power that has been modified in the course of its exercise. None the less, it remains the case that the field of culture is thought of as structured by the descending flows of hegemonic ideologies, transmitted from the centres of bourgeois cultural power, as they reach into and reorganize the everyday culture of the subordinate classes. As a consequence, analysis is then often concerned to ascertain how far and how deeply such ideologies have reached into the lives of the subordinate classes or, per contra, to determine the extent to which their downward transmission has been successfully resisted. It is thus that studies of the mid-nineteenth century advocacy of rational recreations are usually preoccupied with assessing the degree to which bourgeois cultural and ideological values succeeded in reorganizing working-class thought and feeling, and especially with determining how far down the class structure their influence reached: only so

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far as the upper reaches of the labour aristocracy or more deeply into the ‘respectable’ sections of the working class (see, e.g., Bailey, 1987; Gray, 1976)? While not wishing to gainsay the importance of such concerns, the focus they embody is, at best, one-eyed. For the assumption that the advocacy of rational recreations was premised on their anticipated success in transforming working-class ideology and consciousness is a questionable one, and especially so if it is supposed that such a transformation was expected to result from the working-class’s simple exposure to the purely mental influence of such recreations. Rather, cultural reformers were often less concerned with questions of consciousness than with the field of habits and manners. Moreover, in so far as they did anticipate any changes in the former, it was thought that this would only come about as a result of transformations in habitual norms and codes of conduct that contact with rational recreations would effect. Such contact, however, was not envisaged as exclusively or even mainly mental in form. Rather, if access to the world of rational recreations was expected to result in changed forms of behaviour and habits of conduct, this was because that contact was planned to take place in a technologized environment—the museum or the concert hall, for example—in which the desired behavioural effect was to result not from contact with ‘culture’ in itself but rather from the deployment of cultural objects within a specific field of social and technological relations. Thomas Greenwood’s staunch advocacy of the civilizing virtues of science museums thus rested less on the intrinsic properties of the objects displayed than on the manner of their display within the specialized classificatory environment of the museum. The working man or agricultural labourer who spends his holiday in a walk through any well-arranged Museum cannot fail to come away with a deeply-rooted and reverential sense of the extent of knowledge possessed by his fellow-men. It is not the objects themselves that he sees there, and wonders at, that cause this impression, so much as the order and evident science which he cannot but recognise in the manner in which they are grouped and arranged. He learns that there is a meaning and value in every object, however insignificant, and that there is a way of looking, at things common and rare, distinct from regarding them as useless, or merely curious (1888:26). Similarly, the specific knowledge acquired in the course of such a visit is less important than the new habits to which it gives rise—ideally, a self-activating desire for the pursuit of knowledge that will serve as an antidote to less civilizing habits. Greenwood thus continues:

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After a holiday spent in a Museum the working man goes home and cons over what he has seen at his leisure, and very probably on the next summer holiday, or a Sunday afternoon walk with his wife and little ones, he discovers that he has acquired a new interest in the common things he sees around him. He begins to discover that the stones, the flowers, the creatures of all kinds that throng around him are not, after all, so very commonplace as he had previously thought them. He looks at them with a pleasure not before experienced, and talks of them to his children with sundry references to things like them which he saw in the Museum. He has gained a new sense, a craving for natural knowledge, and such a craving may, possibly, in course of time, quench another and lower craving which may at one time have held him bondage—that for intoxicants or vicious excitement of one description or another (26–7). The behavioural changes which might result from the working class’s exposure to art in art galleries were similarly often expected to derive from the opportunities for commingling with middle-class exemplars which visiting art galleries afforded as much as from the qualities of the art displayed.4 Indeed, the quality of the art displayed was often viewed as quite incidental to the prospective technological effects of art galleries in these regards. When quizzed before the 1867 Select Committee on the Paris Exhibition, for example, Henry Cole could not be budged from the view that, once placed in the environment of a museum, any art was imbued with a civilizing potential which made it preferable to no art at all: …and I understand you to state that you consider that the gift of indifferent pictures to the museum would be productive of unmitigated good; is that your opinion?—Certainly; but it is a vague term to say indifferent pictures. I could go through the National Gallery where there are many pictures which in one sense are indifferent pictures; there they are, and people go there to see them; you cannot say it is evil and not good. I say it is an unmitigated good… Do you think it is desirable that the standard of taste should be maintained in this country at its present level, at which you say that a picture like the ‘Derby Day’ would beat any Raphael hollow?—I presume to say I do not know what is the standard of taste. I understand you to say, that if the ‘Derby Day’, by Mr Frith, and a Raphael were exhibited in this country, the ‘Derby Day’ would beat the Raphael hollow in its appreciation by the people of this country; do you think that that state of things is desirable?—No; but I think it is desirable that people should be taught to look at the pictures, and to take pleasure in them. Either good or bad?—Either good or bad, unless they are indecent or bloodthirsty; but I think a picture which is harmless in its morality is a

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work of art; and I think if it attracts anybody to look at it, that is something gained to the cause of civilisation. I had much sooner that a man looked at an inferior picture than that he went to the public-house. Why do we try to purchase good works of art, if it is desirable to have bad ones?—Just in the same sense that a glass of table beer is better than nothing, but you would prefer sherry, perhaps, if you could get it (‘Select’, 1971:920–4). In the nineteenth-century advocacy of rational recreations, then, as well as in the development of public art galleries, museums and concert halls, we can see the development of a new orientation vis-à-vis culture, one in which specific forms and arrangements of culture are judged capable of being harnessed to governmental programmes aimed at the transformation of popular morals and manners. This envisaged effect, however, is anticipated in view of the way in which specific forms of culture are instrumentalized— fashioned into useful vehicles f or governing—rather than from their intrinsic properties even though, as I shall argue shortly, this inscription of culture into governmental programmes both supplies the conditions for and is assisted by the development of essentializing aesthetic discourses. I am suggesting, then, that an understanding of the relations between culture and power in modern societies needs to take account of the instrumentalization of culture which accompanies its enlistment for governmental purposes. For the culture/power articulation which results from these developments is quite distinct from the organization of such relations in earlier societies. Within the absolutist regimes of early modern Europe, for example, culture certainly formed part of the strategies of rule and statecraft. It thus formed part of a sphere of élite display through which, in prerevolutionary France, the aristocracy could be bound to, and rendered dependent on, the world of the court. Equally, so f ar as the relations between state and people were concerned, it formed part of a politics of spectacle through which the might and majesty of royal power was dramatized via its symbolic display.5 Of course, there remains a symbolic aspect to the relations between culture and power in modern societies; the ‘politics of spectacle’ did not die out with the ancien regime or Old Corruption.6 However, this aspect no longer exhausts such relations or even accounts for their most distinctive qualities. Rather, these are to be found in the respects in which culture comes to be imbricated within governmental programmes directed at transforming the mental, spiritual and behavioural attributes of the population. If culture is the servant of power within absolutist regimes, the power it serves is—if not a singular one—certainly a power which augments its own effects in being represented as singular just as it is a power whose interest in the generality of the population is limited to the need to impress it into obedience. In the early nineteenth century, by contrast, we see the sphere of culture being, quite

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literally, refashioned—retooled for a new task—as it comes to be inscribed within governmental strategies which aim less at exacting popular obedience to a sovereign authority than at producing in a population a capacity for new forms of thought, feeling and behaviour. Both relations of culture and power, of course, are productive; but their productiveness belongs to different modalities. They aim at producing different kinds of persons, organized in different relations to power, and they proceed by means of different mechanisms for distributing the effects of culture through the social body: the representational and symbolic versus the governmental and technological. If we are to write an adequate history of culture in the modern period, it is to the changing contours of its instrumental refashioning in the context of new and developing cultural and governmental technologies that we must look. This is not to say that the changing coordinates of ‘culture’s’ semantic destinies are unimportant. However, it is to suggest that these derive their significance from their relations to culture’s governmental and technological refashioning. Some pointers as to the directions which such a revisionist history might take can be indicated by briefly developing the three provocations I mentioned earlier. Culture and its discontents The differences between high and popular culture, Geoffrey Nowell-Smith has argued, are becoming increasingly blurred in view of two considerations. First, the fact that virtually all forms of modern culture are capitalist means that dif ferent realms of culture can no longer easily be distinguished in terms of their relations of production while, second, modern culture tends increasingly to comprise a ‘single, intertextual field whose signifying elements are perpetually being recombined and played off against each other’ (1987:87). There is, however, a third reason. For it is also true that virtually all forms of culture are now capable of being fashioned into vehicles for governmental programmes of one sort or another—for AIDS education programmes, for example, or, as popular literary texts come to be incorporated into the literature lesson, as textual props for ethical or civic trainings of various kinds. It is, indeed, precisely these kinds of changes which form part of the material and institutional conditions of existence which have supported the development of cultural studies. In these various ways, then, the co-ordinates of the discursive field in which the modern concept of culture first emerged—a field characterized by the antinomy between the high and the popular—are being weakened. Yet these discursive co-ordinates were also practical ones in that it was precisely the production of a vertical relation between the high and the popular which established the gradient down which the ‘improving’ force of culture could flow in order to help ‘lift’ the general cultural level of the population. The point I’m after here is that it was precisely the aestheticization of high culture

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which provided the enabling conditions for the production of such a gradient. There is not, that is to say, any opposition between culture’s aestheticization and its being rendered useful as an instrument for governmental programmes of social and cultural management. To the contrary, it was only the development of aesthetic conceptions of culture which allowed the establishment of those discursive co-ordinates in which élite cultural practices could be detached from their earlier functions—of dazzling spectacle, for example—and then come to be connected to civilizing programmes in which they could function as instruments of cultural ‘improvement’ directed toward the population at large. If, today, the discursive co-ordinates which supported such conceptions and strategies are mutating, this is partly because of a tendency toward selfundoing that is inherent within them. An important characteristic of the relations between culture and power developed in the nineteenth century consisted in the degree to which forms of culture needed to be valorized as embodiments of universal norms of civilization or humanity in order to be rendered governmentally useful. Yet this process has also served to generate alternative demands and oppositions from the zones of exclusion and margins which it itself establishes. It is in this respect, to come to my second provocation, that many modern forms of cultural politics can be viewed as byproducts of culture’s governmentalization rather than as arising autochthonously out of relations of repression. Foucault has argued that the government of sexuality has given rise to a new sphere of biopolitics in which new kinds of counter-politics have been generated in view of the ‘strategic reversibility of power relations’ through which, as Colin Gordon put it, ‘the terms of governmental practices can be turned around into focuses of resistance’ (1991:5). We need also to be alert to the ways in which the utilization of culture as an instrument of government has exhibited a similar capacity to generate its own fields of counter-politics. Demands that representational parity be given to women’s art in art galleries or to the histories of subordinate social strata in history museums are thus ones which are generated out of, and fuelled by, the norms of universal representativity embodied in the rhetorics of public art galleries and museums. Earlier collections of valued objects seem not to have given rise to any similar demands—partly, no doubt, because of the limited influence of democratic and egalitarian philosophies but also because the principles of curiosity and wonder which governed the constitution of such collections meant that no general political value could be attached to the question of what was included within, or excluded from, such collections. For, where objects were collected for their curiosity value, it was their singularity that mattered, not their representativeness.7 Only the refashioning of the semiotic frames of reference of collecting institutions such that cultural objects came to be displayed and classified in terms of their representativeness of general norms of humanity lent any cogency or purpose to the view that the histories and cultures of

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different social groups should be accorded equal representational rights and weight. The first organized campaigns for more attention to be paid to women’s history and culture in collecting institutions thus took the form of a demand that such matters be accorded representational parity within the universalizing project of modernity as exemplified by the international exposition.8 Many aspects of modern cultural politics, then, are effects of the ways in which specific fields of cultural practice have been governmentally deployed. The same is true of many aspects and forms of cultural analysis. Moreover, this is so in ways which render the opposition between textual analysis and policy analysis quite disabling. For the text which analysis encounters and which must be engaged with, theoretically and politically, is never simply given to analysis. Rather, what a text is, and what is at stake in its analysis, depends on the specific uses for which it has been instrumentalized in particular institutional and discursive contexts—some of which, of course, will be governmentally constructed and organized. This being so, the development of politically self-reflexive forms of textual analysis depends precisely on adopting a policy perspective—that is, on recognizing how the textual regime in question functions as part of a technological apparatus with a view to considering the kinds of reading activities and relations through which that regime might be redeployed for new purposes. Take the modern art museum. Clearly, many forms of textual analysis—art history, for example, in its commitment to tracing intertextual relations within the archive of the museum text—are dependent on the assemblage of art within museums and on the systems that have been developed for recording, collating and exchanging information between museums. However, it can also be argued that, in view of its functioning as an institution of social differentiation, the modern art museum has fashioned a distinctive textuality for the the modern art object, one which organizes social relations of inclusion —which, of course, are also always ones of exclusion—by producing an invisible depth within the art-work (the depth, precisely, of its intertextuality) such that a line can be drawn between those who can, and those who cannot, see its ‘hidden’ significances. Questions of textual analysis—and of how to approach them—thus cannot, on this view, be posed independently of their implications f or the positions and practices they make available in relation to this specific, socially and historically produced form of textuality. Indeed, political debates within the art museum are, in essence, debates about how (if at all) this distinctive textuality of the art object might be retechnologized and for what purpose—questions whose axes are simultaneously policy and textual ones.

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From critics to technicians Government, then, is not the vis-à-vis of cultural politics. It is an abstraction to be opposed in the name of a cultural politics which imaginarily draws its nourishment from a ground outside the governmental domain: the purely economic conditions of existence of a class, say, or the somatic resistances of the body. Rather, the relations between government and modern forms of cultural politics are ones of mutual dependency. How cultural forms and activities are politicized and the manner in which their politicization is expressed and pursued: these are matters which emerge from, and have their conditions of existence within, the ways in which those forms and activities have been instrumentally fashioned as a consequence of their governmental deployment for specific social, cultural or political ends. Clearly, perspectives of this kind sit ill at ease with what have come to be regarded as the central paradigms of cultural studies. For if cultural studies is defined by it concerns—theoretical and practical—with the relations between culture and power, it has largely envisaged such relations negatively in its critiques of dominant cultures as instruments of an oppressive power. The position argued here, by contrast, attributes a certain productivity to power in contending that the modern forms of culture’s politicization are historical outcomes of the specific relations between culture and power that have been embodied in culture’s fashioning as an instrument of government. This theoretical dissonance, moreover, has far-reaching practical consequences in suggesting that cultural studies needs to devise different ways of intervening within the fields of cultural politics it identifies as relevant to its concerns. The issues that are at stake in many fields of modern cultural politics, I have thus argued, are a historical result of the ways in which cultural forms have been technologically adapted in order to be rendered governmentally useful. However, if this is so, then it follows that making a difference to how culture works—altering the fields of uses and effects within which specific forms of culture are inscribed and which they help to support—is also a technological matter requiring that close attention be paid to the nuts-andbolts mechanisms which condition the governmental uses of specific cultural practices in the framework of particular cultural technologies or apparatuses. Take the manifold political issues associated with the relations between nation, culture and identity. It is clear that this nexus of relations has been shaped into being by the activities of modern governments concerned to endow their citizens with specific sets of nationalized traits and attributes. It is also equally clear that, whatever their present configuration, there can be no reorganization of the relations between nation, culture and identity without intruding policy—and so a shift in culture’s governmental deployment—into that trinity. Such an intrusion might take different forms: the regulation of broadcast content by bodies like the Australian Broadcasting Tribunal, for example, or the monitoring of the cultural resources available to minority

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ethnic groups of the kind undertaken by the Office for Multicultural Affairs. It might equally take the form of new protocols of reading which, in allowing literary or film texts to be technologized in new ways by providing readers with different exercises to undertake in relation to them, allow those texts to play a role in the refashioning of national identities. Cultural change—or, perhaps better, changing what culture does—thus emerges as a largely technical matter, not, however, in the sense that it is something to be left to specialists but rather in the sense (the good Brechtian sense) that it results from tinkering with practical arrangements rather than from an epic struggle for consciousness. For cultural studies this would mean not merely a shift in its command metaphors of the kind proposed by Cunningham (away from rhetorics of resistance, progressiveness, etc., and toward those of access, equity, and empowerment). It would also entail a shift in its conception of the kind of enterprise it envisages itself as committed to and of the means by which that enterprise might be realized. The style of intellectual work—and the associated rhetorics, modes of address, styles of pedagogy and forms of training—cultural studies sees itself as concerned to promote is of crucial significance in this respect. The model of the cultural critic—of the intellectual engaged in the struggle for consciousness by means of techniques of cultural commentary—has not been the only model of the intellectual informing the history of cultural studies. It has, however, been an influential one, and it is one that is deeply written into the tradition—at least in its British versions—given its historical affiliations with literary criticism. It is, moreover, a model of the intellectual that is now being significantly reinscribed into cultural studies as—in one of the more influential of the many guises in which it now appears within the academy— it is increasingly cast in the role of heir and successor to English. This unfortunately means that it also often takes on the moral mantle of English in supplying an institutional and discursive context in which the trainee cultural critic can become adept in using a range of moralized enunciative positions. As an alternative, then, cultural studies might envisage its role as consisting in the training of cultural technicians: that is, of intellectual workers less committed to cultural critique as an instrument for changing consciousness than to modifying the functioning of culture by means of technical adjustments to its governmental deployment. Notes 1 Especially as there are signs that this version of ‘the policy debate’ will prove an influential one within Australian cultural studies. Grace’s antinomial constructions are thus echoed by Deborah Chambers in her editorial for the June/July 1991 issue of the Australian Cultural Studies Association Newsletter. 2 Cunningham’s use of the term ‘leadership’ here is, perhaps, misleading. My sense, from the context of his discussion, is that the concept of ‘cultural facilitation’

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3 4

5 6

7

8

would have better suited his purposes given, on the one hand, the élitist associations of traditional conceptions of cultural leadership or, on the other, their association with Gramsci’s conception of the role of intellectuals in providing moral and cultural leadership for social classes and allied social movements. Clearly, neither of these meanings accords well with Cunningham’s sense that intellectuals should play more of a technical and co-ordinating role in enhancing the range of available cultural resources and facilitating more equitable patterns of access to those resources. For a complementary discussion of related issues, see Bennett (1992). For a fascinating discussion of the influence of such views in the development of art galleries and exhibitions in mid-to late-nineteenth century Leeds, see Arscott (1988). Even though the text (and not just the reception) of such spectacles was often more ambiguous than has usually been supposed. See Laqueur (1989). However, the rhetorical strategies of the politics of spectacle were significantly transformed in the nineteenth century. For a discussion of these transformations in the case of museums and exhibitions, see Bennett (1988). For an excellent discussion of the contrast between the focus on the singularity of objects in pre-modern collecting institutions and the concern with the representativeness of objects evinced by modern public museums and exhibitions, see Breckenridge (1989). For a detailed example of the pre-modern concern with the singularity of objects, see MacGregor (1983). For a full account of the most influential of these campaigns and its influence on American feminism, see Weimann (1981).

References Arscott, Caroline (1988) ‘“Without distinction of party”: the Polytechnic Exhibitions in Leeds, 1839–45’, in Wolff and Seed, editors, The Culture of Capital: Art, Power and the Nineteenth Century Middle Class, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Bailey, Peter (1987) Leisure and Class in Victorian England: Rational Recreation and the Contest for Control, 1830–1885, London: Methuen. Bennett, Tony (1988) ‘The exhibitionary complex’, New Formations, 4. ——(1992) ‘Putting policy into cultural studies’, in Grossberg, Lawrence, Nelson, Cary and Treichler, Paula, editors, Cultural Studies, Routledge: New York. Breckenridge, Carol (1989) ‘The aesthetics and politics of colonial collecting: India at world fairs’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 31 (2). Cunningham, Stuart (1991) ‘A policy calculus for media studies’, paper presented to the Fourth International Television Studies Conference, London. Foucault, Michel (1980) ‘Two lectures’, in Gordon, Colin, editor, Power/ Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977, New York: Pantheon Books. Gordon, Colin (1991) ‘Governmental rationality: an introduction’, in Burchell, Graham, Gordon, Colin and Miller, Peter, editors, The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, London: Harvester Wheatsheaf. Grace, Helen (1991) ‘Eating the curate’s egg: cultural studies for the nineties’, West, 3(1). Gray, Robert (1976) The Labour Aristocracy in Victorian Edinburgh, Oxford: Clarendon Press.

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Greenwood, T (1888) Museums and Art Galleries, London: Simpkin, Marshall & Co. Hunter, Ian (1988) Culture and Government: The Emergence of Literary Education, London: Macmillan. Jardine, Lisa and Swindells, Julia (1989) ‘Homage to Orwell: the dream of a common culture, and other minefields’, in Eagleton, Terry, editor, Raymond Williams: Critical Perspectives, Cambridge: Polity Press. Laqueur, Thomas W. (1989) ‘Crowds, carnival and the state in English executions, 1604– 1868’, in Beier, A.L., Cannadine, D. and James, M.R., editors, The First Modern Society: Essays in English History in Honour of Lawrence Stone, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. MacGregor, A. (1983) Tradescant’s Rarities: Essays on the Foundation of the Ashmolean Museum, 1683, with a Catalogue of the Early Collection, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Nowell-Smith, Geoffrey (1987) ‘Popular culture’, New Formations, 2. ‘Select Parliamentary Committee Report on the Paris Exhibition, 1867’ (1971) British Parliamentary Papers, Shannon: Irish University Press, 920–4. Weimann, Jeanne (1981) The Fair Women, Chicago: Academy Press. Williams, Raymond (1979) Politics and Letters, London: New Left Books.

TOM O’REGAN

(MIS)TAKING POLICY: NOTES ON THE CULTURAL POLICY DEBATE1

Much of the literature associated with cultural studies can be interpreted as policy analysis. This is because, historically, cultural studies has been centrally concerned with the exploration and criticism of various strategies and programmes of action and obligation, organized both discursively and institutionally. The forms of power as exercised by state and private institutions, the forms of conduct they proscribe and the accommodations and resistances they meet are part and parcel of cultural studies’ very orientation. That orientation almost constitutes a policy in itself. In this context policy tends to be understood in terms of its consequences and outcomes, and in terms of the actions of those affected by it, as they exert some measure of influence upon the process. Cultural studies has adopted a determinedly ‘bottom-up’ policy towards all this, so as to foreground negotiations to the institutions and structures which formulate and design everything from texts to the built environment to administrative programmes. Policy programmes per se were not of so much concern as were their negotiation by their intended subjects; whether the ‘wild’ viewers in media analysis (see Ang, 1991), the recalcitrant students destined for careers as labourers in the pedagogic analysis of Learning to Labour (Willis, 1977), or particular subcultural, ethnic and gender identities formed in response to social planning, media logics, or prescriptive forms of moral and social conduct (Gillespie, 1989; Hebdige, 1979; Dyer and Baehr, 1987). In accordance with this largely ‘bottom-up’ programme, the policy of cultural studies involved foregrounding the recipient, the victim and the marginal in the exercise of social and cultural power. Sometimes this entailed a strategy of providing such recipients with a voice they would not otherwise have (Krisman, 1987); sometimes it simply served as a kind of news function (Hamilton, 1990); at its best it encouraged forms of community-authorized speech or strategic intervention (Crimp, 1988). Cultural studies’ polemical practice was one which often championed the restoration of community and ritual in the face of what James Carey (1989) calls a ‘transmission’ view of culture and communication (manipulation, control at a distance on the part of government and private agencies from broadcasters to the education system). Cultural studies distanced itself, on the one hand, from political economy and

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cultural industry approaches by insisting on the degree of noise, negotiation, failure and contradiction attendant upon all social interactions in the passage from donor to recipient, TV institution to audience member, newspaper to reader, entertainer to entertained. On the other hand, it distanced itself from textual analysis approaches by situating the reading and consumption of symbolic goods into a multiplicity of audience settings—socio-cultural, ethnic, subcultural and gendered. At its best cultural studies promoted a multilayered account of social practice in which the meaning of, say, a film or TV programme would be traced not in one analytical exercise but in a series of texts where textual analysis, political economy and ethnography would all play a part (Michaels, 1990). Coupled with this multidisciplinary approach, cultural studies was characterized by a particular ethical agenda, perhaps best expressed in the work of Eric Michaels.2 His research was driven by a set of ethical concerns for the politics and conduct of research, of media practice, and of the consumption of media and artistic programming. In the process he transformed the visual anthropology of Sol Worth (1981). For instance, Michaels: • took the enterprise of ethnographic film-making, already historically fraught with problems, one stage further. In the process he articulated a new and emerging role for the European in Aboriginal Australia, as facilitator rather than creative collaborator; • overturned some traditional ‘policy’ expectations about so-called disadvantaged or non-literate audiences, concentrating instead on the way in which video and TV technologies were incorporated in a dynamic way into their culture;3 • attacked the priority given by government to ‘educating the white audience’, directing Aboriginal media priorities towards inter-and intra-Aboriginal communication (1987a: 72). • demonstrated the ethical issues of subjects’ rights, typically overlooked by documentarists (film-makers and social scientists alike), concerned as they were purely with the description of social problems (1987b): • eschewed the easy and simple divisions between audience studies, producer studies, and institutional studies; seeking instead to locate TV as part of wider social technologies, in an approach he sometimes called an anthropology of TV (1990); • actively sought community authorization of the research work which he conducted for and on behalf of a particular Aboriginal community (1985). On such grounds as these, cultural studies engaged with the policy development of the state, from the point of view of disadvantaged recipients or those who are excluded from such polices altogether, and it sought to defend or restore community. For instance, Tim Rowse, in Arguing the

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Arts (1985) rewrote Bourdieu (1980) in the Australian context of arts policy, supporting forms of community arts, the basis of social equity and community involvement. Cultural criticism in this universe entailed both cultural critique and policy engagement; some writers typically moved between both poles. Sometimes cultural critique acted as a substitute for policy, at other times it was a priority in itself—it just depended on where you were, and on the environment in which decisions were being made (whether decision-making was responsive to engagement or not). Things varied from sector to sector; in Australia, for instance, museum, art, film, and educational policy provided scope for policy engagement, while broadcasting policy presented more difficult (though not impossible) prospects. Things also varied from country to country; the Reagan and Bush years have not been conducive to even marginally left involvement in cultural policy in the USA. In Britain meanwhile, the Thatcher period saw the disruption of connections between cultural initiatives and cultural criticism. Thatcherism excluded radical criticism from the policy club altogether, as screen and arts policy were increasingly determined from the top. But in Australia, the same period saw the years of Labour ascendancy; in such a climate, progressive cultural criticism could and did ‘count’ rather more than in countries where conservatives were in office. Yet in Australia too it was a period when ‘policy’ seemed to come into its own, in the form either of a pro-active consultancy role or of a reactive political role, lobbying for the maintenance of existing programmes. Either way the 1980s increasingly saw the ascendancy of a differently constituted ‘policy’ arena— and policy increasingly became known through governmental nomenclature, such as film policy, broadcasting policy, arts policy, equal opportunity policy and the like. It has become a more central political and public issue at a time when government resources for culture have been diminishing, when the management of the public sector has been overhauled, and programmes for educational relevance have gained favour in the political arena. Enter the ‘policy debate’ in cultural studies in Australia.4 Most of the intellectual running on behalf of the pro-policy position has been made by writers associated with or close to Griffith University in Brisbane—Tony Bennett, Stuart Cunningham, Ian Hunter, Colin Mercer, Jennifer Craik, Toby Miller (and, in a previous incarnation, myself)—especially since the founding of its Institute for Cultural Policy Studies (ICPS). The Communication Law Centre at the University of New South Wales and the Centre for International Research in Communication and Information Technologies (CIRCIT) in Melbourne are also active in ‘policy’ work. For these players, there is something wrong at the heart of the whole cultural studies enterprise. They call for the double reconstitution of policy: both as an object of study in its own right and as a political site for activity and analysis. They argue that the policy process as understood by governmental and private agencies should also be the centrepiece of cultural studies itself. However, since cultural

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studies was already concerned with policy, the current debate is over its orientation, and about what can count as policy; hence, for them, cultural studies should reorient its concerns so as to coincide with top-down programmes and public procedures, becoming bureaucratically and administratively minded in the process (see Bennett, 1989). What is meant by ‘policy’ would also be narrowed in focus, towards those things which are called policy in political and bureaucratic terms—and these things, together with their agents and agencies, would constitute strategic targets for cultural policy studies. Such an orientation is therefore interested in creating a focused object with a definite inside and outside, assigning limited purposes to it, and in modifying the role of critical theorizing and polemical analysis with regard to it. The policy-maker emerges in this scenario as an intellectual agent in his or her own right, making and intervening, not simply translating or putting into effect the ideas and plans of ‘pure’ intellectual cadres. For policy proponents, adjustments in cultural criticism itself flow directly from policy activity; existing cultural criticism is criticized with reference to policy and policy analysis. Policy becomes the motor that drives cultural criticism, making it congruent with policy through impressing upon it ‘appropriate adjustments of a theoretical and practical nature’ (see Bennett, this volume). As Tony Bennett concludes ‘Useful culture’: In short we must recognize that cutting off the King’s head in cultural theory means giving up the stance of the cultural critic and embracing instead that of the cultural technician. Not in a behaviourist sense but from a recognition of the complexity of the relations between culture, government and power which means taking account of the specific natures of different cultural institutions and technologies, the textual regimes that they give rise to and the specific forms of politics that they generate (this volume). Bennett calls for a change of mind-set on the part of cultural studies practitioners to adapt to this policy object. Those espousing a policy orientation on the part of cultural studies see their task as shifting it away from its present moorings and the prevailing ‘rhetorics of resistance, progressiveness, anti-commercialism on the one hand, and populism on the other’, as Cunningham puts it, moving instead ‘toward those of access, equity, empowerment and the divination of opportunities to exercise appropriate cultural leadership’ (1991:434).5 Specifically rejected in Bennett’s words is ‘the grand-standing of the cultural critic as an acceptable mode of intellectual work’ (1989:7)6 in favour of the cultural technician. In such a policy orientation ‘cultural studies’ becomes ‘cultural policy studies’. From this vantage point the existing project of cultural studies appears to be hopelessly anarcho-romantic. Its commitment to community becomes identified as an act of faith; one which can be compromised (as in Raymond

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Williams’s patriarchal Welsh working class, according to Bennett [this volume]). The goal is no longer to celebrate and help restore the community which survives and resists manipulative social and cultural programmes; it is rather to accept the necessary lot of intervention and to recognize that such communities are themselves the by-product of policy. Such a positioning of policy sees the humanities in general and cultural studies in particular as dependent upon policy horizons. This in turn has implications for the tertiary curriculum—especially since cultural studies is actively identified as disabling student participation in cultural industries.7 Cultural policy studies analysts no longer identify, or maintain solidarity, with a broad political front operating on behalf of disorganized agencies and individuals. Instead, they accept a role as nodal points operating in the context of a set of polycentric institutional forces—i.e., they constitute themselves as policy participants in a policy process. The proponents of policy of this kind have conducted their arguments in deliberately provocative and binary terms, if only to provoke debate; setting up divisions such as: policy versus postmodernism; cultural policy versus cultural criticism; reformist versus oppositional political practice; contextualist versus textualist emphases; Foucault the theorist of ‘governmentality’ versus Foucault the libertarian. Promoted as choices, these binaries entail quite different forms of conduct and self-recognition, directing engagement towards very different ends. For those promoting this debate the central concern is with the utility, effectivity and adequacy of cultural criticism on the one hand (seen as deficient on all counts), and the kinds of emergent practices, writing and reading protocols stemming from a policy orientation on the other hand. At the very least the debate signposts as an issue the possibility of selfconsciously extending humanities work to include policy writing, advice and involvement. It also reminds us to take account of quotidian histories, techniques and strategies of cultural governance (i.e., policy) which underlie the international agenda of cultural studies itself. It suggests an alternative career—that of cultural technician as opposed to cultural critic, with a reward structure tangential to but connected with the existing transnational critical networks and their site-specific politics. Being a ‘cultural technician’—in the sense of securing policy resources, consultancies and engagements—becomes in this moment as critical to CV production enterprises as do articles in refereed journals and books. The ‘policy’ debate was in fact designed as a bid to make the humanities—its programmes, its knowledges, and its selfprojections—count in policy development and the policy process by means of ‘attached’ intellectual work rather than just through the ‘unattached’8 involvement of cultural and social commentary. The debate was about the direction of cultural studies as an academic or theoretical enterprise because those making the bid made it so. That they were taken so seriously resulted from shared perceptions of a ‘crisis in the

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humanities’, in terms of its relation to government and its curriculum (Freundlieb, 1990; Knight, 1989; Curthoys, 1991). The controversy assigns ‘cultural studies’ a centrality in discussions over the future of the Humanities that is at first glance surprising, given the tenuous hold of cultural studies as a disciplinary project in Australia and elsewhere. But in Australian cultural journals such as Meanjin, the term ‘cultural studies’ has become almost synonymous with the humanities in general, legitimating the humanities’ effectivity in relation both to aesthetics and to everyday life. In the process cultural studies has become synonymous with the humanities’ most ‘relevant’ aspects—be they study of media, criticism of contemporary texts, historical studies, social practices and the like. Cultural studies in this context comes to mean the broad mix of cultural criticism involving history and anthropology, literature and fine arts, communication and media studies. In such circumstances cultural studies becomes both a pedagogic ambition in its own right and a label for departmental and research organization—there are, increasingly, Schools of Communication and Culture, and Centres for Research in Culture and Communication, in Australian universities. Why this peculiar assignation of centrality to a vaguely defined ‘cultural studies’? It is a reaction to perceptions of the diminishing role and importance of cultural criticism generally in contemporary educational, political and social processes in Australia, which has contributed to a palpable sense of crisis of identity and practice in cultural criticism. It is also a response to the demand for cultural planning and external advice-taking in government and interest-group politics, in areas as diverse as communications, broadcasting, museum, heritage, arts, and educational policy. Under the looser kinds of policy development of the immediate past, various humanities researchers and graduates were able to find important places in policy, but with the ascendance of (‘rationalist’) economics and more centralist policy development these kinds of opportunities and competences have lost ground. The ‘main governmental game’ in policy has been transformed in social and cultural sectors, from styles of advice-taking that are accommodative of consensus formation and of diverse inputs, towards more profoundly centralist, less publicly accountable, and therefore limited styles of advice-taking, marked by the ascendance of economic knowledges in public policy (see Pusey, 1991). This ‘game’ has threatened to remove other knowledges from administrative horizons altogether, particularly those concerned with culture, forcing them at best into an accommodation with economic orthodoxy. Recognition of this governmental logic may account for the slightly desperate tone of some of the propolicy contributions to the policy debate; the fear is that cultural studies is fiddling while Rome burns. The policy bid can be seen then as a kind of reclamation exercise in circumstances where the injunction to be socially relevant has been given a significant, alternative and much more specific ‘policy’ definition. Bennett, for instance, advocates the production of ‘positive knowledges that can be effectively used within actually existing

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spheres of cultural policy formation’ (in Curthoys, 1991:387). Here work is to be regarded as ‘relevant’ insof ar as it participates in and extends administrative processes. The formerly loose and all-inclusive generality of what might count as ‘social relevance’ is radically limited, narrowed to policy practice: that which can be made governmentally or corporately actionable, can be publicly endorsed, and can be institutionally sanctioned and found useful by government, tribunal, policy-makers and interest-group lobbyists directly involved in forming policies. Of course these competing terms of ‘relevance’ are not new, but what is different here is that the propolicy position has been lent extra weight and gained powerful allies by virtue of the contemporary policy moment and adjacent changes in tertiary education. For some, like Bennett and Hunter, the turn to narrowly defined policy is also a consequence of a retheorization of the humanities in the light of Foucault’s later writings. In this retheorization the humanities as such become a cultural policy instrument, whose workings can be disclosed by a Foucauldian attention to administrative programmes and their attendant ‘technologies of the self’ (Hunter, 1990). In this respect the ‘administrative’ side of the controversy has been lent extra weight by Ian Hunter’s Culture and Government (1988), a thoroughgoing, sophisticated and ideological reading of the formation of the humanities as a technique of governance and social power. This analysis has wrong-footed certain routine justifications of nonintervention in the humanities (academic freedom, tenure, etc.), and made it difficult to assert that those promoting policy are reliant upon some untheorized pragmatic politics of the existent. Even so, it must be said that Hunter’s is a limited reading of Foucault, using his notions of governance to foreground the production of ‘well tempered subjects,’ to the exclusion of his focus upon ‘unruly subjects’ in Toby Miller’s (1991) happy phrases. Foucault’s admission of the generality of regulation and government as critical in the modern era, is reconstructed by Hunter as an injunction to participate in that regulation as if that were the only socially forceful position to take. It is worth considering Foucault’s position here. He argued that his work should be regarded not so much as providing answers but as providing resources that certain sorts of activists—like prisoners’ rights groups—might find useful in their own practice (1980:62). It was up to such groups to make Foucault’s work ‘useful’; he would not legislate how that use should occur. By contrast the current policy polemic proposes a reading of Foucault which supports not relay and mediation, and therefore a gap between policy analysis and practice, but a means of acting in the social directly on behalf of and for governmental agencies. There is no gap here between cultural criticism and concrete intervention—only applicability, and intervention is thus closely defined in terms of the occupation, consideration and development of ‘policy’. These theoretical and practical developments mirror changes in the ‘external’ economic, structural and political environment, where far-reaching

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reforms both in Australia, the US A and Britain have brought social, industry, communications and arts policy issues to the top of the public agenda. They have also encouraged its proponents to argue for the advantages that a policy orientation can confer on cultural studies and on the humanities in general. But debate about these issues has been divisive. I have been part of this debate and associated with the cultural-policy push. For I do have a certain regard for the practice of cultural policy—it is too important to remain underexamined in cultural studies. Like others who have discovered policy participation and the complexity of policy processes, I found cultural studies’ current emphases and ethical imperatives to be a barrier rather than a vehicle for analysis. Unlike those who berated cultural studies in its more utopian and gestural manifestations, I simply set up shop somewhere else, and have variously gone by the label of cultural historian, film critic, sociologist, and political scientist. My criticisms of cultural studies were every bit as unflattering as Bennett’s or Cunningham’s; they were just made in private or on Stuart Cunningham’s questionnaire (circulated as part of his research for Framing Culture), and remained at that personal level through which one’s own institutional and writing trajectory is negotiated. No wonder then that my own reluctance to endorse the cultural policy push wholeheartedly, and to take calculated distance from it, was surprising to those who expected my support. I could not give this support and was critical of the form and direction of this debate. But this was criticism within cultural policy studies about its direction and orientation, rather than a thoroughgoing defence of cultural studies. With this preamble in mind I will now propose an alternative view of policy to that proposed by Bennett. Foucauldian policy analysis can take two alternative directions: the one pursued by Bennett and Hunter which is reliant upon propositional contents and a reading of Foucauldian ‘rationalities’ as ‘technologies’; and the other, my preferred direction, in which policy is approached as a technique of information handling in much the same way as Bruno Latour (1987) approaches science—as ‘policy in action’, as a cultural technology. Such an approach has no argument with many of Bennett’s fundamental tenets. Policy is interlocked with adjacent fields of cultural criticism, intellectual debate, administration and lobbying. But I don’t think policy, seen as particular intellectual programmes for machining the social, is the structural engine room which powers everything else. Policy is a particular kind of informational practice with its own limitations, potentialities and linkages to other kinds of public discourse, including cultural criticism and journalism, over which it holds no necessary preeminence. Bennett attends to the ‘rationalities’ or ‘intellectual technologies’ of government—i.e., the specification of the policy process itself as a knowledge-producing programme designed to render the social field intelligible, calculable, and productive of certain desired effects. But equally a

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policy focus could concentrate on the ‘rhetorical’, ‘information handling’ practices of governmental and other lobbying groups; their particular techniques of verbal assemblage and attendant reading protocols, the procedures through which other groups and individuals are enlisted, the machinery for the organization of advice-taking. Each brings into relief different aspects of the policy process. The Bennett-Hunter position foregrounds the propositional contents of policy as so many ‘rationalities’; the Latourian position foregrounds the ‘rhetorical’ or persuasive aspects of the policy process—its network of actors, disposition of institutions, enunciative dimension. I don’t think that a cultural studies account of policy can do without each focus. The ‘rhetorical’ understanding of policy informs my analysis of the policy debate itself. I consider policy-making and cultural criticism as taking place in different sites and mobilizing differently organized actors. I see both sites as routinely exchanging personnel, ideas, words and phrases; additionally policy actors will typically use cultural criticism sites to secure advantages in the policy-making process, just as cultural critics will use cultural policy involvements to gain advantages for themselves and their constituents. But the focus on the information-handling practices of policy allows attention to turn to the uses made of inscriptions—the reading and writing practices undertaken, the disposition of ideas and their subsequent ‘careers’ in texts, and the networks of actors engaged in policy. Such a focus assumes that cultural policy and cultural criticism are both part of the larger political process (along with journalism). This suggests that policy and cultural criticism should not be counterposed as either mutually antagonistic forms of life, or as forms of life possessing any intrinsic conceptual, political or ethical advantage over each other. Rather a set of historically determined relations organize their differences and similarities over time rendering the form of the relation between the two unavailable to general proscription. However, in the Australian policy debate, the specificity of cultural policy as opposed to cultural criticism has been sought in terms of the character of their respective propositional contents—the words and phrases that they use. It is argued that cultural criticism could become cultural policy if it used different and more appropriate phrases and words—if it acquired a policy language and reformist orientation (Cunningham, 1991:434). I see this is a fundamental category mistake. The difference between cultural policy-making and cultural criticism consists as much in the kinds of reading, writing and manipulation that are practised upon ‘proposition contents’ as those contents themselves. Policy and cultural criticism are contiguous styles of reasoning involving shared discursive resources and reasoning procedures, but they deploy such shared resources in different ways (the same distinction holds for the ways in which politicians, journalists and interested others argue, criticize, add to, and consider policy).

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So a choice cannot be made between policy and cultural criticism—we simply do one or the other depending upon the circumstance, sometimes we do both at the same time. This is not to have it ‘a bob each way’ (as Tony Bennett suggested of my ‘Dismantle’ paper). It is simply to point out that our contemporary society has a number of different information-handling practices and ways of action and intervening in the world. Such diversity cannot and will not be ‘remedied’ by fiat, by turning cultural critics into bureaucrats, or by taking no account of the varieties of textual, critical and analytical techniques that are associated with the humanities and cultural studies. Policy needs to be understood alongside a range of other activities and sites, including cultural criticism, journalism, cultural production, capital p politics. Sometimes it may act in a command position with regard to these sites, but mostly it does not, remaining instead just another minor player, alongside the much maligned ‘cultural critic’, whose social power therefore also needs to be understood. This power may be difficult to mobilize concretely and resembles in important ways ‘star’ or ‘personality’ power. Yet such figures may shape the public agenda in ways that permit policy actors to act, providing them with valuable resources and arguments. For instance, I have shown elsewhere (O’Regan, 1983) that there simply would not have been the kind of publicly funded support for feature-film production if it were not for the cultural criticism of the late 1950s and 1960s. As far as intervention and self-conduct are concerned, the very issue of choosing between policy and cultural criticism—which to write f or, which to inhabit—must turn out to be a question admitting no general answer. There are no a priori principles for choosing policy over cultural criticism. Nor can any presumption be made about social utility and effectiveness as necessarily belonging to one or the other. Cultural policy and criticism are not hermetically sealed but are porous systems; open enough to permit transformation, incorporation and translation, fluid enough to permit a great range of practices and priorities. To put this crudely: words like ‘social class’ and ‘oppression’ (and their attendant rhetorics) may not enter the vocabulary of government policy, but without their social presence in credible explanatory systems, any policy directed towards securing equality and equal opportunity would be diminished in scope and power. The recognition of oppression informs the policy goal of access, the persistence of social class underwrites the goal of social equality. Cultural policy and criticism are different forms of life, but they often need each other, they use each others’ discourses, borrowing them shamelessly and redisposing them. Under some conditions they may clash, but normally they go happily along their more or less parallel, more or less divergent paths. It seems to me that a critical regard for policy may end up serving four different purposes:

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• state purposes—efficiency, equity, excellence, etc.; • reformist purposes—which involve working ‘within’ administrative knowledge but with the aim of effecting changes; • antagonistic purposes—which involve critique and opposition, both general and policy-specific; • diagnostic purposes—in which policy emerges as a politics of discourse in a descriptive enterprise. These are also the purposes for policy analysis, i.e., cultural studies. In Foucault, Latour and Michaels, policy can serve each of these purposes and the writer adopts one or the other depending upon the circumstance. By contrast, for those involved in the ‘policy debate’, it appears to be a priority to expel antagonistic or oppositional purposes on an a priori basis, at least those identified as tendencies in cultural studies itself. This hostile orientation to cultural studies can, I believe, be explained by reference to the purpose of the ‘policy debate’ for those making it. Its purposes may be listed as follows: • The debate serves to legitimate a focus on policy and governmental process as the object of attention on the part of a broad left constituency. • It provides a way of promoting ‘policy’ in the theoretical and historical self-understandings of cultural studies. • It promotes the adjustment of the tertiary curriculum, to take account of policy. • It orientates academic and general intellectual attention towards policy uptake, and away from less direct, eccentric, and antagonistic cultural engagements. • It makes a bid for the humanities to count on policy horizons, and serves to connect the humanities to the social sciences in ways cultural studies has neglected. • It seeks to ensconce policy participation in career, reputation and reward structures. • It promotes an edifying purpose for policy; intellectual, moral and social, rather than it being seen as simply pragmatic, instrumental or opportunistic reasoning. Changes in policy development and education have led to identifiably different responses. First there is a purely ‘professional’ response; to participate in the policy development structures in a professional manner providing a service. A second response is to see involvement in policy as a holding operation, intellectually justified on the grounds of the special needs of a particular sector. This entails a sense of academic responsibility and has led a number of left-leaning intellectuals, previously distanced from the film policy process and critical of it, to become central to the projects of the things they

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once criticized.9 A third response is to hold out for different techniques of policy engagement; calling for more bottom-up rather than top-down policy development, more tribunal and public commission and less consultancy (though this can manifest itself as nostalgia for past policy-making programmes, less hostile to forms of knowledge dear to the given writer). Fourth, there is the response of going on the offensive; ‘if you can’t beat them join them, and then you might be able to develop counter-programmes and institutions’. Here policy is a way of meeting a more sharply defined ‘relevance’ agenda, setting ‘new horizons’ that are forward looking, and sometimes working on the principle of getting in before the political right does, occupying the policy domain to pre-empt a more complete overhaul. A fifth response is to create scapegoats; criticizing cultural studies and intellectuals for helping to bring about the present environment. Here cultural studies is blamed for not maintaining a necessary concern for policy, therefore not recognizing larger ‘political’ moves, therefore not intervening in them. Scapegoating can be quite poignant as it involves identifying as culprit one’s own past history or what Bennett has called his ‘erstwhile theoretical self’.10 These pro-policy responses have in turn engendered a backlash because of their institutional threat to critical reasoning, which is justified by reference to ‘academic freedom’, ‘freedom to think’, as a non-instrumental reasoning which is historically aligned with oppositional, oppressed and marginal groups. The policy push is criticized as a kind of ‘asset stripping’ operation, which denies the specificity of the techniques, orientations and practices that cultural studies may be good at. It appears to those engaged in cultural studies that the policy push would leave cultural studies as a mere social-science policy project, stripped of both humanities and critical social-science knowledges. Questions have also been raised about the very narrow view of policy as simply policy development, government process, consultancy and the like, as opposed to a wider view which includes other participants and knowledges, beyond commissioned policy documents, published procedures and the like. Relatedly there is a questioning of the way consultancies are conducted, and the ethics of arranging fields of knowledge and assuming a relative importance through the arrangement. Finally there is the criticism that those promoting the debate have ensconced a’pragmatic’ politics as the horizon of the thinkable—thereby assuming a solidity rather than fragility to those politics and political processes. That is to say, this programme tends to assume a rightness of current politics and agenda setting. It relies less on principle than upon identification of political needs to be met. In cultural studies we often make a topic of other people’s contestive conduct, but there are few ethnographies of intellectual communities in conflict—we rarely consider our own handling of controversy as an information-handling priority. The policy debate certainly says much about styles of engaged performance in an area which defined its boundaries in terms of definite moral and ethical imperatives. Such imperatives license the engagé

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(e), help organize the performance of a passionate engagement with methodology, procedure and orientation. They authorize forms of public recanting which don’t function to shift the recusant off the stage but to push him or her further into the limelight. And they authorize an either/or, for or against logic, in which colleagues are deemed to hold up, inhibit and prevent the realization of the critical and interventionist programme proposed, because of their articles of faith, research priorities and political emphases. Consequently there is a turning inward rather than outward; a few heads are kicked, rather than a different story being told or a different intervention in the social field being organized. The controversies that result from the exercise of these logics are tailormade for another sort of intervention. This is one which seeks to hold the diverse projects together, to diminish the scale of the controversy, to dissolve it by pointing to fundamental continuities between positions. I’ve tended to occupy that position. For me the policy debate raises questions rather than provides any answers. The varying meanings of policy for cultural studies and cultural policy studies admit no general answer. The debate does however put policy at the very heart of the critical enterprise, which in turn informs and speaks through even those like Bennett who in their explicit policy orientation seek to make it object and topic of analysis. These are then some notes on a broader conversation with policy which is affecting my teaching, my writing and my very understanding of social and cultural institutions. It identifies my fundamental ambivalence about cultural studies as the enterprise of bottom-up analysis of policy’s impact on the ground (and the accommodations and resistances to it), and cultural policy studies as a top-down analysis of policy formation, its rationalities, its programmes, its forms of social action. Perhaps this ambivalence is fence-sitting, but I’d like to think it was something else— recognition that both dimensions are important to critical and pedagogic programme. Once again Eric Michaels can stand for a possible practice: ethical research scholar, policy adviser, social and cultural critic, art critic, community facilitator, bringing his results back to the Aboriginal community at Yuendumu. Tony Bennett and Stuart Cunningham both practice these policies too, when they are not limiting cultural studies to cultural policy studies. Notes 1 I would like to thank John Hartley and Ien Ang for their comments on this and earlier drafts. This article has particularly benefited from John’s editorial eye. 2 For a bibliography of Eric Michaels’s work see ‘Eric Michaels: a partial guide to his written work’, Continuum, 3(2), 226–8. This issue is devoted to an appraisal of Eric Michaels’s intellectual and political projects. 3 This is a central concern of Michaels (1987a).

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4 The debate is registered most forcefully in the following essays and publications: Tony Bennett, ‘Useful culture’, in this volume; Bennett (1989); Miller (1990); Cunningham (1989,1991,1992); Grace (1991); Turner, 1990. 5 This quotation was cited approvingly in Bennett’s ‘Dismantle’ paper. 6 The cultural critic is rejected in Bennett’s mind because his/her orientation is to ‘a purely rhetorical politics, highly prone to denunciatory stances, in which positions are deduced from general principles and applied across different policy fields with scant regard for their different histories, organisation, characteristic mechanism, institutional arrangements, and so on’ (Bennett, 1989:7). 7 This is a point that Stuart Cunningham (1991) and Geoff Hurd and Ian Connell (1989) make. 8 Terminology adopted from Robert K.Merton (1968). ‘Unattached intellectuals’ refers here to those ‘intellectuals who do not perform a staff function in helping to formulate and implement policies of bureaucracy.’ For Merton academics are unattached intellectuals despite their connection with ‘academic bureaucracy’ in that ‘they typically are not expected to utilize their specialized knowledge for shaping the policies of the bureaucracy’ (266). 9 In the area of Australian screen studies Elizabeth Jacka and Stuart Cunningham are the most significant in this respect, providing supportive comment to the Australian production industry in their published articles, letters to the editor, consultancies and books. But this has become a more general condition. I too have found myself regularly dealing with the Australian Film Commission and the Screen Producers Association of Australia. 10 Bennett was responding to a demand ‘to name names’ at the ‘Dismantle’ conference.

References Ang, Ien (1991) ‘Stalking the wild viewer’, Continuum, 4(2), 19–35. Bennett, Tony (1989) ‘Culture: theory and policy’, Culture & Policy, 1(1), 5–8. Bourdieu, Pierre (1980) ‘The aristocracy of culture’, Media, Culture and Society, 2, 225– 54. Carey, James (1989) Communication as Culture, Boston: Unwin Hyman. Crimp, D. (1988) editor, AIDS: Cultural Analysis, Cultural Activism, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Cunningham, Stuart (1989) ‘Cultural critique and cultural policy: handmaiden or no relation’, Media Information Australia, 54, 7–12. ——(1991) ‘Cultural studies from the viewpoint of cultural policy’, Meanjin, 50 (2/3), 423–34. ——(1992) Framing Culture, Sidney: Allen &; Unwin. Curthoys, Ann (1991) ‘Unlocking the academies: responses and strategies’, Meanjin, 50 (2/3), 386–93. Dyer, Gillian and Baehr, Helen (1987) editors, Boxed In: Women and Television, London: Pandora. Foucault, Michel (1980) Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977, Gordon, Colin, editor, New York: Pantheon Books.

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Freundlieb, Dieter (1990) ‘Calculating the incalculable: governmental reasoning and the humanities’, Meanjin, 49(2), 368–447. Gillespie, Marie (1989) ‘Technology and tradition: audiovisual culture among South Asian families in West London’, Cultural Studies, 3(2), 226–39. Grace, Helen (1991) ‘Eating the curate’s egg: cultural studies for the nineties’, West, 3(1), 46–9. Hamilton, Annette (1990) ‘Beer and being: the Australian tourist in Bali’, Social Analysis, 27 (April), 17–29. Hebdige, Dick (1979) Subculture: The Meaning of Style, London: Methuen. Hunter, Ian (1988) Culture and Government: The Emergence of Literary Education, Basingstoke: Macmillan. ——(1990) ‘Personality as vocation: the political rationality of the humanities’, Economy & Society, 19(4), 391–430. Hurd, Geoff and Connell, Ian (1989) ‘Cultural education: a revised programme’, Media Information Australia, 53 (August), 23–30. Knight, Stephen (1989) ‘Searching for research or the selling of the Australian mind’, Meanjin, 48(3), 456–62. Krisman, Anne (1987) ‘Radiator girls: the opinions and experiences of working-class girls in an East London comprehensive’, Cultural Studies, 1(2), 219–29. Latour, Bruno (1987) Science in Action, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Merton, Robert K. (1968) Social Theory and Social Structure, New York: Free Press. Michaels, Eric (1985) ‘Ask a foolish question; on the methodologies of cross-cultural media research’, Australian Journal of Cultural Studies, 3(2), 45–59. ——(1987a) For a Cultural Future: Francis Jupurrurla Makes TV at Yuendumu, Sydney: Artspace. ——(1987b) ‘Hundreds shot in Aboriginal community: ABC makes TV documentary at Yuendumu’, Media Information Australia, 45, 7–17. ——(1990) ‘A model of teleported texts (with reference to Aboriginal television)’, Continuum, 3(2), 8–31. Miller, Toby (1990) ‘Film and media citizenship’, Filmnews, Feb. 1990, 5. ——(1991) The well-tempered self: formations of the cultural subject’, Ph.D. Thesis, School of Humanities, Murdoch University. O’Regan, Tom (1983) ‘Australian film-making: its public circulation’, Framework, 22/ 23, 31–6. Pusey, Michael (1991) Economic Rationalism in Canberra: A Nation Building State Changes its Mind, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rowse, Tim (1985) Arguing the Arts, Ringwood: Penguin. Turner, Graeme (1990) ‘Well-kept secrets: the public tole of media studies’, Atom News, 5(4), 7–17. Willis, Paul (1977) Learning to Labour: How Working Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs, London: Saxon House. Worth, Sol (1981) Studying Visual Communication: The Essays of Sol Worth, Gross, Larry, editor, Philadelphia: University of Philadelphia Press.

GRAEME TURNER

OF ROCKS AND HARD PLACES: THE COLONIZED, THE NATIONAL AND AUSTRALIAN CULTURAL STUDIES

The last two years have seen a spate of academic summit conferences, their (primarily invited) speakers reviewing the field of cultural studies and asking questions about its pasts and futures. In my experience, most have been full of the noise of orthodoxies forming, of the closure of consensus, or of the slightly more muffled sound of differences being elided. Certainly it would be hard to deny that such meetings have a consensualizing, unifying rhythm which makes it increasingly difficult to think of theory as in any way contingent, or to acknowledge the varied social political contexts within which cultural studies’ ideas have been formulated and applied. New orthodoxies are being formed now, and they are taking shape, largely, through a limited set of debates: I am thinking of, for instance, the (by now) ritual kicking of the corpse of British subcultural studies; the British/ American competition over agency and resistance, largely approached through theories of the popular audience; problems around the public role of cultural studies intellectuals either as contributors to the policy process (in Australia and the UK) or as academic specialists licensed to address the nation (in the US); controversies around the (lack of) politics of postmodernism; and, increasingly, the writing of the intellectual and institutional history of cultural studies itself. Unlikely as it may once have seemed, cultural studies now seems strongly compelled to authorize a particular version of its history—a singular, unified and inclusive history of its origins and actors. Within these debates, and within the construction of this singular history, there is little recognition of a north/south divide, a first world/second world split (let alone any account of the third world), or of the neo-imperialist operation of cultural studies’ knowledges—an operation which is entirely consonant with the political histories of the nations producing them. Rarely is there any attempt to address differences between nations or cultures with anything like the attention devoted to addressing differences within nations or cultures. A comparative tradition, so far, is virtually nonexistent. It is hard not to see many of these debates as at some remove from what we might regard as important issues in Australia: issues that still bear on the relation between the work of cultural studies intellectuals and their immediate cultural contexts, but which might have to

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do with specifically postcolonial formations of nation and national identity and with strategies for fracturing or multiplying the dominant formations of that national identity. The ‘Dismantle’ conference, then, is both appropriate and unusual in that its emphasis is a de-centring one, looking out from rather than complacently touring the perimeters of the territory already settled. This conference has the potential to puncture cultural studies’ illusion of homogeneity, because it at least asks us how we might think of cultural studies as a multiplicity of theorized practices. Among these multiple practices are Australian cultural studies. Here, I want to indulge briefly in anecdote. Three years ago I shared a panel with Graham Murdock, doing one of those ‘Where is Cultural Studies Now?’ pieces.1 We disagreed over what, from my point of view, was his Eurocentric account of the globalization of culture and the subsequent need to jettison such hoary old categories as ‘nation’ or ‘imperialism’. Already, as it were, speaking from a post-1992 Europe, Murdock theorized the role and formation of the citizen in ways that discounted and marginalized the local or national context. From Murdock’s point of view, he was offering an important corrective to Birmingham’s obsession with the idea of the nation, an obsession which had proscribed cultural studies’ development in the past and was now responsible for its blindness to the ‘explosive growth of transnational culture’ (1989:43). From an Australian’s point of view, Murdock’s claim that the growth of transnational culture was a new phenomenon suggested, at least, a lack of scrutiny of his own nation’s history. Certainly, the ‘explosion of transnational culture’ (if we call it that, rather than colonialism or neo-imperialism) has a long history in Australia. Among the aspects of Australian culture to have felt its effects are the film industry, the television industry, the music industry, the publishing industry, the daily press, tourism, inner urban real estate, not to mention the tribal culture of the original inhabitants of the continent. To my consequent proposition that the priorities for Australian cultural studies were therefore very different to those he outlined, Murdock agreed that there was a place for some more specific, ‘national’ work in Australia, but that Australian cultural studies must nevertheless accept that there was now a larger theoretical agenda which ultimately it had to address. For him, the national culture was of interest as a source of examples for a larger issue, or as part of a larger story, but not in its own right. Both our arguments were shaped by the different cultural positions from which we spoke, although only one of us made this explicit. We were arguing not only as representatives of intersecting theoretical traditions but also as representatives of particular formations of those traditions within specific national cultures under specific social and political conditions. Our dispute, and our inability to accept even the framing assumptions of each other’s application of theories upon which we both largely agreed,

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demonstrates that even theory has its historical locations, working to specific ends within specific contexts. A means of keeping these specific ends in mind, for many of us, is to think of what we do as Australian cultural studies. The consequent insistence on cultural specificity is not so much a proscription of interests, nor (unfortunately) a guarantee of usefulness, but it is rather a reminder of the context where our work ultimately has to be cashed in. To the question of whether ‘Australian cultural studies’ means cultural studies of Australia or cultural studies in Australia, my answer is the latter; but for Australian cultural studies to be worthwhile they must accept the political and ethical responsibility to relate themselves, in the end, to the social contexts in which they take place. The benefits of such a practice do not flow only one way. As I have pointed out in my contribution to Grossberg, Nelson and Treichler’s Cultural Studies: Cultural studies has a lot to learn from the margins, and it should do its best to investigate the ways in which their specific conditions demand the modification of explanations generated elsewhere. At the very least, such an expansion of the cultural studies project provides a hedge against the development of a new universalism (Turner, 1991:650). Thinking of what we do as Australian cultural studies is one thing; naming it as such is another. In general, the production of Australian culture involves confronting a number of double binds: in the Australian film industry, for instance, producers are continually required to decide whether they wish to aim directly at the Australian audience and risk being called parochial or to aim for an international audience, thus ‘selling out’ to commercial imperatives. That these two audiences are not, in fact, mutually exclusive makes the negotiation of this apparent contradiction that much more difficult but, in practice, no less necessary. In the practice of cultural analysis, there are a number of central contradictions too, the ‘rocks and hard places’ of my title. These are problems I am conscious of in my own work; others have talked about them in the course of their work too, and they seem almost inescapable—they were active well before cultural studies. I want to elaborate my view of some of them. The contradictions are grouped, it seems to me: the first grouping we might organize around the problems of postcoloniality. I am not a postcolonial theorist, and so this will be less than detailed or developed, but I want to list some of the double binds Australian cultural studies faces that seem to me the product of Australia’s postcolonial status. The first of these is the complexly ambiguous relation between the postcolonial nation and its Other, the colonizing power. While the connection with the Other is precisely what the postcolonial must break, Australians regularly define their dif f erence through binary systems which reconnect them—through, for instance,

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the conventional Australia/Britain opposition. Although postcolonial identity depends on rupturing the colonial frame, the strongest evidence that such a rupture has been effected seems to be provided when the colonial power acknowledges it; it is as if even the status of postcoloniality is dependent upon the assent of the colonizing Other. Postcoloniality means living with contradictions, occupying positions that can be shown to be less than consistent. Postcolonial intellectuals may feel compromised when criticizing their own culture, because their criticism tends to align them with the colonizer; alternatively, uncritical defence of their culture aligns them with the chauvinistic nationalism so widely and variously used as a mechanism for generating consensus on a delimited definition of the nation. The postcolonial must take on the tricky task of operating differently in different contexts; this means that their interrogation of the nation may well be different when delivered outside its boundaries. Maintaining one’s inconsistency is difficult to do, requiring just the kind of self-confidence the postcolonial most often lacks. In so many fields of endeavour, from business to culture, the postcolonial craves international recognition—only to find that the pursuit of such recognition distances them from their original, albeit compromised, sense of themselves. My preferred expression of this double bind is from Sylvia Lawson, in her introduction to The Archibald Paradox: The Archibald paradox is simply the paradox of being colonial. Metropolis, the centre of language, of the dominant culture and its judgements, lies away in the great Elsewhere; but the tasks of living, communicating, teaching, acting-out and changing the culture must be carried on not Elsewhere but Here. To know enough of the metropolitan world, colonials must, in limited ways at least, move and think internationally; to resist it strongly enough for the colony to cease to be colonial and become its own place, they must become nationalists (1987:ix). The postcolonial, then, puts the idea of the nation to work in the service of a progressive politics; indeed, there are plenty of areas of cultural policy in Australia where it has become the point of resistance to subordination. Such a potential, it is often and confidently argued, has long been disarticulated from ideologies of the nation in Western Europe, although recent events in Eastern Europe strongly suggest this view needs urgent revision. In Australia, the category of the national is still an enabling one, around which left intellectuals might organize their theory and practice. Nevertheless, this category, and the use to which it is put, is the second grouping of rocks and hard places I want to consider in this paper. The category of the national is not such a hot topic in European cultural studies2 these days, and for good reasons. My current impression is that the general direction of Euro-cultural studies is increasingly global, theorizing the

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transnational citizen rather than the national subject. The interest in the reorganization of cultural industries and cultural politics across geopolitical and cultural boundaries is of course given great urgency by the united European Community of 1992. In any case, the idea of the nation is discredited within Marxian theory generally. In Western European history, nationalism has operated as an essentializing explanatory ideology and is thus the target of critiques from a wide range of political positions. This has been the case for quite some time. The resurgence of nationalisms in Eastern Europe at the moment reminds us, though, that such a position is easily relativized, depending on whose nationalism it is, and against whose control it is seen to be reasserting itself. Both media and academic narratives of the revival of suppressed or dormant nationalisms which have undermined socialist control of governments in Eastern Europe are notable for the extent to which they have naturalized nationalism as the authentic voice of the people. It is safe to say, though, that while the postcolonial must be, in Lawson’s words, both internationalist and nationalist, there is a strong tradition of legitimate scepticism about the uses to which the idea of the nation can be put. It narrows and delimits, defines and prioritizes; it does not disinterestedly describe. Within Australian cultural studies, this general problem is exacerbated by the fact that the category has been so widely used in Australian cultural analysis and criticism that it is now almost irremediably tainted by the residue of its dominant modes of deployment. ‘Radical nationalism’ is the historiographic label closest to the surface here, and it applies to a particular breed of left conservatism producing cultural analysis which has been almost entirely devoted to the discovery of the ‘national character’, the assertion of a distinctive and narrowly defined Australian ‘identity’. From the 1950s on, radical nationalism has almost entirely captured the writing of Australian histories, with the result that Australian history has become predominantly a narrativization of the development of the national type.3 No amount of questioning, such as that mounted by feminist histories, seems able to shake the cultural purchase of this model. Consequently, to talk of Australian cultural studies and not entirely to jettison the idea of the nation, which is what I want to do, it becomes necessary to find a way of holding nationalism and its thematics at bay. On the one hand, a defence must be mounted of the notion that there is a national culture which may not be ‘organic’ or ‘authentic’ but which none the less systematically produces differences and interests which should be respected, maintained and, at times, protected. On the other hand, those who have reservations about the idea of the nation have to insist that it is, after all, imaginary, and that its momentum towards unity is to be resisted and interrogated. Given the comprehensiveness of radical nationalism’s capture of the discourses of national identity, it can be quite difficult—in practice—to

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maintain the kind of distance I suggest. I want to talk a little more about this, drawing from my own work and addressing in particular the difficulty of breaking away from some of radical nationalism’s central sets of analytic binaries which set British values against Australian values, British class division against Australian egalitarianism, British high culture against Australian popular culture. Meaghan Morris has rebuked me about my vulnerability to such binaries in my work in the past, suggesting at one point that the British connection was almost entirely irrelevant.4 While accepting that the connection has been worked over, almost perhaps to exhaustion, I still see it as far from irrelevant. Just over the last decade, events such as the Maralinga Royal Commission, the Spycatcher trial, the award of the Booker Prize (the major fiction award in Britain) to two Australians (Thomas Keneally and Peter Carey), and the prominence of comparisons between the Australians and the British in film and television texts (Gallipoli, Breaker Morant, Bodyline, for instance), demonstrate the power of the continuing influence. Indeed, in my own research on both the Spycatcher trial and the Maralinga Royal Commission I was not surprised to see how often their procedures and their representation in the media depended upon the old binaries. The Spycatcher trial involved a book of revelations by a former M15 agent which has been banned under national secrecy provisions in Britain but which was being published in Australia. The British Government took the publishers and the author to court in Australia in order to prohibit publication here. The principles at issue, from the point of view of Australian law, were largely to do with national sovereignty, but the Spycatcher trial’s popular celebrity depended more upon its highly publicized ritual of ‘Pombaiting’: an unequal contest between the unorthodox young-gun Sydney lawyer, Malcolm Turnbull, who was defending the elderly author, Peter Wright, and the very orthodox head of the British civil service, Sir Robert Armstrong, who became the fall guy for M15 and Margaret Thatcher. The Maralinga Royal Commission was a more serious and far-reaching case. Its terms of reference were to investigate the A-bomb tests conducted by the British in Australia from the mid-1950s to the early 1960s. The Commission’s aim was to press for compensation for victims of the tests (few precautions were taken against radiation contamination), and for rehabilitation of an irradiated area of central Australia the size of England. The Maralinga Royal Commission also became a spectacle of national revenge, at one point moving to London to hear evidence or, as one commentator put it, to give the Poms ‘a taste of the colonial birch’ (Whitton, 1985:4). The key Australian figures involved in these events, Malcolm Turnbull and the Royal Commissioner James McClelland, were widely identified in the media as classic Aussie heroes—shrewd, resourceful, irreverent, larrikinlike, cheerily shoving it up the clenched cheeks of British officialdom. (Alternatively, and still within the confines of the framing binaries, Sir Robert Armstrong was hailed by the British Mail on Sunday as a

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hero, comparable with Clive of India, on his return home from being ‘viciously assailed by native tribesmen’ (Turnbull, 1988:168). While the British/Australian binary is crucial in defining the dominant discourses deployed in media representations of these events, the analysis needs to go further than simply to note what is after all a pretty unsurprising fact, that representations of such events will necessarily invoke myths of the national character and that these myths are discursively structured around comparisons with the British. What is interesting about these cases is not their reproduction of or contribution to the formation of a national character. It is the way in which the discources of national character are captured and put to work in the service of interests that have little if any thing to do with those of ‘the nation’. Malcolm Turnbull is a most unlikely hero for egalitarianism. An upperclass, Oxbridge-educated lawyer, he is most widely known now as the remaining partner in the merchant bank Whitlam Turnbull, for his role as the legal spokesperson for media magnate Kerry Packer, when countering allegations of an industrial alliance with Rupert Murdoch aimed at dividing up the Australian newspaper industry, and for forcing three independent local members to resign from the governing council at Bond University, Australia’s private university, in order to make room for the nominees of the Japanese corporation, EIE (Bond’s bankrollers). During the Spycatcher trials, Turnbull was sympathetically portrayed in the news media, as is evident in the relaxed and informal poses which recur in the photos used, and in the constant reference to his plucky underdog status. The arbitrariness of Turnbull’s enclosure within discourses of the national character is apparent when we look at more recent representations, where he has been cast as the rapacious and power-hungry businessman about whom even his close friends are loath to comment in case they wind up in litigation. Some sections of the community had never been fooled, though. As a telling consequence of his notoriety as defence counsel in the Spycatcher trials, Turnbull was made Business Review Weekly’s Businessman of the Year in 1987. While it stretches the conventional application of the term ‘businessman’, the award is ideologically apposite; it is not hard to see Turnbull’s celebrity as articulated to that extraordinary popular endorsement of the ‘new’ speculative Australian capitalism of the eighties—that which we might identify with such entrepreneurs as Alan Bond and John Elliott. Indeed, it is possible to move from Turnbull’s case to a wider analysis of the representation of radically selfinterested business practices in Australia during the 1980s and show how these events have been coded, their ideologies naturalized and their ethics legitimated, through the conventional binaries used to construct discourses of an Australian national identity. If we move beyond the simple mapping of the construction of national identity around media reports of the Maralinga Royal Commission and of the Commissioner himself, it is again easy to see how misleading these

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nationalist discourses have been. The jingoistic, Pom-baiting cultural nationalism of the media representations has actually worked against the legitimate objectives of what we might think of as the political nationalism of the Commission—to redress the damage done by the atomic tests, and to reveal (and if possible demolish) the processes which delivered Australia as an acquiescent and willing (not, importantly, misguided and gullible) accomplice in the tests. While cartoonists drew parallels between (the 1950s Prime Minister) Menzies’ sycophantic Anglophilia and (the 1980s Prime Minister) Hawke’s degrading toadying to the US, the countervailing general impression of an Empire striking back robbed such parallels of their force. It is no surprise that despite a highly public demonstration of the British Government’s culpability in their conduct of the tests, the clear evidence that thousands of British and Australian soldiers suffered radiation-related sickness or death as a consequence, and the revelation that an entire Aboriginal homeland had been rendered more or less permanently uninhabitable, no compensation has yet been paid, nor is there any clear prospect of this in the future. Even more worrying, Maralinga could happen again,5 and one of the reasons why it could happen again is because the Royal Commission is publicly supposed already to have set the record straight by giving the Brits a taste of the colonial birch. The kind of account I have just sketched out is different from that which might be produced by radical nationalism. The objective of radical nationalism is the naturalization of the discourses I have looked at, the authorization of specific versions of the national character. Within such a programme, once the British/Australian binary is installed, there is little point in carrying the analysis any further. That, I guess, is why Meaghan Morris was critical of the appearance of that binary in my work. Such a mode of analysis can only reproduce new versions of what it analyzes, until it moves beyond the limitations of the traditional binaries and the traditional privileging of explanations of the national character. But there are other ways of talking about the national, ways that still defend the importance of the idea of the nation because of (or perhaps despite) the uses to which it may be put, and ways that enable us not only to displace earlier nationalist discourses but also ourselves, to perhaps interrogate the forming of our own positions, as among the processes to be understood. The dilemma of finding a way to practice within the kinds of contradictions I have outlined is among the dilemmas of Australian cultural studies. A consequence is that the field of cultural studies in Australia has particular characteristics that differentiate its practices as well as its locations and interests. In some ways, of course, it is defined by its hybridity—the range of methodologies and protocols we import and use. Much of Australian cultural studies, like much of British cultural studies, manages to be specific in its applications while also, unlike much British cultural studies, remaining aware of the transnational theoretical contexts in which it might be used. Some

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examples reveal the benefit of an unusually eclectic range of influences; others disclose a healthily ambivalent relation to academic discourse itself, to its formality; much writing on film and television is informed by a cultural nationalism not often made so explicit in European or American work; the analyses of popular culture fall somewhere between the slightly romantic alignment with the popular that marks much British work, and the neodemocratic collapsing of the critic into the fan I would identify with American analyses. As in all areas of Australian cultural production, the contribution of our immigrants has been profound. I am not leading the reader toward yet another invocation of ‘national character’—this time in theory. What I have described does not amount to a unified, characteristic, ‘Australian’ theoretical position. Australian cultural studies are multiply fragmented—by institution, by discipline, by their politics, by the regional location. There are good reasons why they should remain so, in my view. However, outside Australia there is talk of a distinctiveness in the work produced here. Such a perception may simply express the nostalgia of the centre for the margin; it certainly reflects the slight exoticism with which Australian subject matter and popular cultural forms are often regarded elsewhere. But I would also evaluate it as the effect of Australian cultural studies’ frequently expressed suspiciousness, the product not only of the footwork required to walk a tightrope over the contradictions described earlier, but also of a quite routine struggle to modify and adapt northern orthodoxies so that they might be of use within this context. And so, I ‘suspect’ that, while the testing of theory and method against cultural experience may not produce a unified theoretical tradition, it does constitute a characteristic if diversified procedure of application and interrogation. I might even suggest that the postcolonial’s version of bricolage—of continually modifying and adapting what comes to us so that it can be put to use—is not only a valuable tactic for Australians; it might also be salutary for others who can benefit from thinking how their ideas might be put to use in another hemisphere. Notes 1 The burden of both our presentations are published in the Australian Journal of Communication, No. 16,1989. 2 By ‘European cultural studies’ here, and at the risk of doing some colonizing myself, I am referring primarily to work from Western Europe. 3 A fuller account of this is in Turner (1991). 4 See Meaghan Morris’s question in the discussion following my paper in Grossberg, Nelson and Treichler’s Cultural Studies (1991:651). 5 Indeed, within one year of the conclusion of the Royal Commission, the then Minister of Defence, Kim Beazley, wrote to the Aboriginal custodians of the land asking for permission to use it for military ‘instrument’ research. Since then, there have been

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reports of the French conducting research on nuclear radiation there and strong rumours that the area is to be offered to the USA when they move out of the Philippines.

References Grossberg, Lawrence, Nelson, Cary and Treichler, Paula (1991) editors, Cultural Studies, New York: Routledge. Lawson, Sylvia (1987) The Archibald Paradox, Melbourne: Penguin. Murdock, Graham (1989) ‘Cultural studies at the crossroads’, Australian Journal of Communication, 16. Turnbull, Malcolm (1988) The Spycatcher Trial, Melbourne: Heinemann. Turner, Graeme (1991) ‘“It works for me”: British cultural studies, Australian cultural studies and Australian film’, in Grossberg, Nelson and Treichler (1991) pp. 640–50. Whitton, Evan (1985) ‘Her Majesty’s Govt gets a taste of the colonial birch’, Sydney Morning Herald, 5 Jan. 1985:4.

McKENZIE WARK

SPEAKING TRAJECTORIES: MEAGHAN MORRIS, ANTIPODEAN THEORY AND AUSTRALIAN CULTURAL STUDIES

National identity occurs in an encounter with cultural difference when and only when that difference cannot be represented to the satisfaction of all concerned: or alternatively, the ‘Australian’ is that which irrupts as anecdotal in a theoretically rigorous exchange. (Meaghan Morris) Anecdote Apoignant moment in Eric Michaels’s (1990) posthumously published diary is when he reports a conversation with Nick Zurbrugg in Brisbane, in which the latter takes Fredric Jameson to task for his theory of postmodernism, laying out a critique that to Michaels seems valid and just.1 As Michaels records in his diary, he silently noted to himself that, the pertinence of the arguments notwithstanding, Jameson was still Jameson and Zurbrugg still Zurbrugg. This distribution of discursive power being what it is, Jameson would remain safe from provincial critique—no matter how valid. The significance of this moment lies in Michaels’s silence. He does not mention the question of power to Zurbrugg. The question arises elsewhere, written in another context. In the first instance, it would have been bad form to mention it, for academic discourse relies very heavily on an image of itself as the closest thing to an ideal speech situation. Without the reassuring thought that one can challenge Jameson or John Fiske or whoever, a lot of writing would grind to a halt. Instead it gets written, and sometimes its critiques are just. The only remaining problem is that it may not get read. This problem, the antipodean critique that goes unnoticed, is the subject of another kind of discourse, an unacknowledged one. Michaels does us a f avour (and commits an indiscretion) by writing it down—by committing the anecdote, as it were. There is a gap between the ideal image of academic discourse as an ideal speech situation and the experience of practising it as a rough-andtumble discursive struggle. In the washing machine of academic discourse, this power, far from coming clean about its machinations, is sometimes

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reinforced in the name and the very act of its denunciation. The rest, as they say, is gossip. I feel about cultural studies much the same way Michaels does about Jameson’s critique of the postmodern. Cultural studies denies me a position from which to speak that could challenge the assumptions at its centre. Meaghan Morris goes even further in suggesting that cultural studies actually discredits certain voices, for example the ‘unequivocally pained, unambivalently discontented, or aggressive theorising subject’ (1988a: 20). For Morris, the problem is to ‘create a place from which to speak’ that allows a feminist voice to do more than ‘answer back’ to hegemonic modes of discourse. This may be an ambivalent, anxious or irritated voice, but in any case is a more nuanced speaking-position than the critic or the fan. My problem as a researcher is a little different: how to answer back from the antipodes to the international media vector (Wark, 1988). What this has in common with the problematics of a feminist speaking-position is an experience of being marginalized, both in the discourses one writes about and in the academic discourse which might take those discourses as an object. For example, in viewing the Gulf War from the antipodes (Wark: 1991a), one suffers a double indignity in viewing first the jingoistic call to arms which constituted the American media version of it, followed by the critical reaction from concerned scholars and activists. The latter was without doubt far more politically correct, but from an antipodean angle was no less American and no less silencing. The methodological problem here is a double one. It is not solved by trading on the legitimacy of an international academic theory to bolster one’s chances of speaking authoritatively, or by invoking the name of its alter ego in cultural studies, ‘the popular’. The interesting thing about Morris is that she takes all this on board— colonial antipodality and feminism as minor and difficult speaking-positions —and gets away with it. In multiplying the difficulties of finding a place and a rhetorical means to speak, Morris has improvised solutions. For example, she treats the question of defining the feminist content of an inquiry into everyday life as ‘an invitation to make up answers as I go along’ (1988b). In a similar vein, I want to create a space to address three problems which I believe to be cognate: the relation of the international movements of academic theory to the phenomena of transnational cultural flows and media events; the problem of academic discourse and the ‘other’ which it posits in relation to itself; and lastly, the issue of the historical experience of changing media technology. These three inquiries about respectively, discourses, borders and media are closely linked and require close attention to writerly strategy to overcome them. I can’t overcome those problems here and now, although I will refer to bits and pieces of work where I am trying to do so. The purpose of this essay is to show how useful the rhetorical tactics worked out by Morris can be to the exercise. I also hope to discharge a debt to those writings which

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have helped me enormously over the years. But first, some contextualizing remarks are in order. Vector There have been a lot of discussions in Australia about ‘import rhetoric’— about the effects of the importation of theory on local problems (see Morris and Freadman, 1981). Usually the theory in question is French ‘poststructuralist’ theory—British cultural studies has until now pretty much been let off the hook in those discussions. I have nothing against the importation of theory. The issue that concerns me is different: the intersection of international flows of culture. Both academic theory and electronic media flow with increasing ease in international spaces. The growth of cultural studies, seen from the point of view of the effects of the development of new media technologies, is part of the phenomenal increase in the volume and velocity of transborder cultural flows that are increasingly making all of us into ‘cruising grammarians’, to borrow a phrase from Morris (1988b:195). The historical development of the vector-field, as I have called it elsewhere (Wark, 1991a), has led to a proliferation of information movements, and a whole new series of problems concerning the movement of information from one cultural context to another. The reciprocal relation between CNN, Iraqi TV and Australian TV audiences and power élites might be one example here. How can the passage of a message from Baghdad to Atlanta to Sydney to Canberra be understood? When Saddam Hussein appears on CNN (via Channel Ten) stroking the hair of his boy-hostage, is this communication, or is it just a displacement of information, where each cultural milieu interprets the same images in radically different cultural terms? Does cultural studies, so closely tied as it is to the national-popular paradigm of hegemony or even more localized ethnographic concepts of shared spaces of meaning, or Foucauldian concepts of particular institutional powers, even have the means of interpreting this? If it doesn’t, how can the omission be rectified from the periphery, geographically and intellectually, of the discourse? Perhaps we would need to add to the list of possible reading practices within culture. Alongside the dominant, negotiated and resistant readings posited by Stuart Hall, some categories for perverse and paradoxical cross-cultural misreadings might be needed to account for the effects of transborder culture-flows (Wark, 1991b). It may seem extreme to think of the relation of Australian culture to Birmingham cultural studies as on a par with the relation between CNN and Saddam Hussein, but that is only so if we see academic discourse as somehow removed from the array of ‘other discourses’ that it studies, as being closer to an ideal speech situation than other discourses. I see no reason in principle why the flow of cultural commodities, the books, magazines and conferences that are its stock in trade are any different from any other such flow. Every

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cultural commodity belongs to a fuzzy set of related merchandise and with a milieu of users who construct singular but overlapping tactics out of such fragments. Different cultural commodities have different speeds and different distributions, to be sure, but I see no difference in principle between Australian academics practising Birmingham school cultural studies and the Japanese Elvis clones practicing the hip-wiggle in Harajuku Park.2 Both make use of the commodities arrayed for them to choose from in a given space, at a given time. In both cases the distribution of cultural commodities is an effect of a particular, historical vector-field of transnational communication. As to who has in their possession more ‘cultural power’ in these examples, I think this is by no means obvious nor even the most important question. The argument that the academy is the privileged site in relation to other cultural sites seems to me to be inaccurate and more than a little nostalgic— particularly in the Australian context, where the academy has really never had much cultural legitimacy in the first place. It may also let the old ‘Eng. lit.’ snobbery in through the back door with a less reactionary alibi. Cultural studies, after acknowledging that some actors have more power than others in various cultural flows, then usually moves on to acknowledge qualitative differences. Yet there seems to me to be an element of bad faith in this. The abandonment of the ‘bad totality’ of Marxism and the leverage it gave to critique seems to have resulted in a tendency towards the celebration of this or that popular, polysemic, pleasurable, resistant cultural practice—a tendency widely noted and now frequently criticized. Yet another equally pervasive effect goes unnoticed. In giving up the bad totality in theory, cultural studies does not give up the totalizing speaking-position. The culturalstudies author, paradoxically enough, sometimes becomes the master of difference, offering the unified theory of difference. Here ‘quantitative differences’ in the degree of power and qualitative differences in its effects become the secondary and supplementary terms to a privileged relation between the theorist and the popular. Excluded from view are the minor, crabby voices, as Morris points out. Most importantly from the point of view of my own researches, it establishes the theorist as a speaker ‘who is supposed to know’. This reassuringly knowledgeable writer can discourse on the hegemonic culture as one who knows it, is party to it, yet who renounces his privilege in the name of the popular. The identity of the hegemonic writerly voice with the hegemonic culture (within but against the dominant culture), allows cultural theorists to use their scholarly authority to champion popular knowledges and practices. Very well; but when it comes to cultural experiences like watching the Gulf War on TV in Australia, no such assumptions can be made. Watching CNN’s image of Baghdad immediately strips one of this ‘insider’s knowledge’ of the hegemonic culture. One has to approach culture from a point of view denuded of easy authority and privileges in relation to the object. Doubly so: I cannot speak of Baghdad without confronting the

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problem of my own ‘orientalism’, inherited from media flows from Middle East to West. Yet I cannot speak authoritatively of the West, sitting here on its periphery. Another writerly tack is required—one that begins from a ‘cranky difference’ of no self-importance, rather than one which encounters such a thing in its margins. In the endless dialogue between Frankfurt school/Birmingham school, once the nuance, the detail, and the political contexts have been spirited away in the endless paraphrasing precession of academic commodification, what one is left with is an imaginary relation between mirror-image discourses. Round and round we go: élite/popular, ideology/resistance, domination/pleasure… what is rarely challenged is the point at which cultural studies simply affirms the same thing as critical theory: the majestic, authoritative overview of the author, flying high above the culture industries like Icarus. The concessions cultural studies makes to difference, the powerless, and so on, frequently occur within this framework. This ‘circle of banality’ can only be superseded, I think, by renouncing the totalizing first principles of academic practice, and starting again from the assumption that, in a field of heterogenous discursive practices, academic knowledge has no particular privileges. A far more differentiated writing practice, a little more consistently distanced from ‘bad totality’, might burrow away within the meanings that are negotiated or indeed perversely transformed in the relation between milieu.3 One might begin here from differences in the uses which are made of cultural commodities, and the affirmations they make possible, affirmations of community or continuity. In short, this means abandoning the sovereign right and imaginary autonomy accorded to academic discourse, which in cultural studies seems to have taken the place held by the Communist Party in Lukacs or Althusser—a phenomenon which is perhaps best described as ‘Mannheim’s revenge’. This ‘view from below’ can also be spatially imagined as a view from ‘the periphery’. This may sound like a species of the ‘cultural imperialism’ argument, and to some degree it is. One should never lose sight of unequal flows of cultural product and cultural power, yet what is more important than the unequal flow is the qualitative uses to which it is put on the receiving end. Rather than seeing the antipodean character of Australian culture (including cultural studies) as a negative factor, the trick is to make it a positively useful one. In agonizing over the ‘paradox’ (as Sylvia Lawson (1987) describes it) of antipodean identity, our neurotic, jaw-clenched mutterings have by sheer luck stumbled upon precisely the theoretical issue which the intensification of the transnational media vector-field is forcing upon everyone. As transborder cultural flows proliferate, unequal flows and problematic uses of displaced cultural matter multiply. Given that many of those flows are unequal flows, antipodean cultural relations between locations which might previously have had no relation at all suddenly arise.

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So in a sense the combination of shared language with the ‘tyranny of distance’ made us neuroticly fixated on the antipodean relation, on the problem of drawing a line between self and other under pressure of an almost overwhelming flow of dominant culture. This experience is now a global phenomenon (see Wark, 1990a, b). Of course, there are many kinds of paranoid discourse about fixing a bound between self and other, but Australian culture has suffered it in the form in which it now mostly appears to occur—as a geographic relation affected by the spatial flow of culture. As a problem of mapping and landscapes, as Jameson (1991) would have it—a postmodern condition. So perhaps, in the writing of and on Australian culture there are already some resources for responding to the antipodean relation which the media vector seems now to be intensifying. Since luck is still our only competitive advantage, perhaps we should grab this chance gleefully. There might be a lot to learn in cultural studies from the creative use made of the antipodean relation in, for example, Australian pop music, film and the visual arts. Take, for example, the film Mad Max III, as examined in Ross Gibson’s (1985) exemplary reading (writing). Or what Paul Taylor (1982), writing in Art & Text, slyly called the ‘multinational culture’ of a certain visual arts practice. In saying that cultural studies has something to learn from cultural practice, including the writerly practice of the exemplary Australian essayists who emerged in the eighties such as Morris and Gibson (Ross, not Mel), I am saying that cultural studies ought to see itself as a type of cultural production rather than as something removed from culture. It seems to me that ‘becoming popular’, as a project for cultural studies, could mean nothing else than seeing itself as a form of cultural production which engages in a dialogue with other forms, perhaps with a specific role of translating and negotiating between cultural forms, local and international flows, new and old media in a conscious fashion. What matters is not how we ‘read’ culture, but how we ‘write’ it. Exchange Something which might be called cultural studies, but which is usually not discussed as such, led a marginal but creative life in Australia in the late seventies and early eighties. The early essays of Meaghan Morris appeared for the most part in the plethora of small magazines which occupied a precarious space between the art world, the academy and the political left.4 This tactical mode of writing existed in a space which of necessity was a space of translation between local and foreign theory, between philosophy and cultural writing, between organic cultural practices in the media and traditional intellectual practices in academia and the arts. Independent, autonomous publishing ventures like Local Consumption, Intervention and the Working Papers Collective created this vital and vibrant space. In a fit of absent-mindedness, the Visual Arts Board had helped nurture this nascent

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practice in the early eighties in journals like On the Beach, Tension and Art & Text. These milieux have given us, I think, the most significant body of cultural writing in this country in recent times. It was quite distinct from ‘and antithetical to’ assimilation of British cultural studies into English departments, but not because cultural studies was mostly ‘Birmingham’ and antipodean writing partly ‘Parisian’, although theoretical differences are never far from the surface here. Rather, it is because antipodean theory really did try to invent a new communicational practice. Rather than simply move between academic discourse and the media in the name of an exchange between the scholarly and the popular, antipodean theory tried to create autonomous communicational structures in the margins between both the media monopolies and the academy. Needless to say, these structures were tiny and either collapsed or were co-opted, but I think those minuscule efforts at least attempted to create a transversal space and a practice commensurate with the theory. It might be objected that the creation of an autonomous zone through the publishing of ephemeral ‘fanzine’ journals in print runs measured in the hundreds is hardly a ‘popular’ move. Yet arguments about the need or desire to make contact with the popular make it a mirror-image prop for the bad totality of academic authority. Given that half the Australian school-leavers who finish their higher school or leaving certificate this year will have enrolled in university within two years. it seems somewhat artificial to see academia as aloof from the popular. Nor do I see any a priori reason for considering the academy more ‘autonomous’ than other discourses and institutions. What is really at stake in discussions of making cultural studies more ‘popular’ is the extension of its authority within orthodox media spaces and through the policy-formation apparatus of the state. Which is well and good, but raises two problems. The first is that when it becomes popular, in the sense of mass circulation in the media, cultural studies displays a most unhappy unconsciousness. Graeme Turner has made much of the ‘popularity’ of works like Iain Chambers’s Urban Rhythms, the Myths of Oz collection and Fiske and Hartley’s Reading Television—even citing sales figures for the latter—yet he laments the misinterpretation cultural studies sometimes suffers in the process of popularization (Morris, 1990a; Turner, 1991). Turner seems to want to have it both ways. He wants to retain some degree of authorial control over the interpretation of the work—a feature of the rules of the game of academic discourse. Yet he wants a popularization through other discourses which don’t respect these rules, but without giving up traditional academic rights to regulate interpretation. The fact is that no other discourse has rules which permit this. There are no references, referees or rights of reply in most other discursive domains. Far from being a drawback, however, this is actually the great merit of rapid cultural discourses—their lack of respect for authorial

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authority, their wilful misinterpretation of any and every text. A genuine ‘becoming-popular’ of cultural studies would have to accept this part of the ‘postmodern condition’ also. The second problem is that the emphasis on a certain kind of popularization through the media and policy apparatus may obscure the need for an ‘unpopularization’ for difficult and marginal works. If one dispenses with the primary image of a popular mass which is then differentiated as a second theoretical moment, and begins instead with the assumption that all cultural practices are primarily a process of indiscrete, ‘fuzzy’ differentiations which nevertheless affirm communal assemblages and continuities at some level, then the search for a mass ‘popular’ audience is indeed a ‘red herring’, as Morris argues (1991a). (Indeed, what might matter most is the different uses to which, say, Fiske’s Television Culture (1987) might be put rather than the number of sales). Further, the use of cultural studies as a type of writing which actually does help constitute a milieu, no matter how minor, no matter how unpopular its outlook and style may be, might be at least as valuable a contribution to the genre as the bestsellers, the textbooks, and the influential policy documents. Perhaps more so, in that the type of writing which can be used to affirm difference might also force innovations within the genre of cultural studies itself—in other words it might become a culture of ‘incites’ as well as insights. So the really challenging task might be to create quite a different kind of writing. A kind which attempts to reach beyond the institutional limits of both the academy and the mass-media popularizers, but without necessarily rejecting either; a kind which Morris once optimistically described (in a rare essay with quite explicitly political determinants), as ‘transversal work across molecular and local groups that eliminate all the filters that operate in communication between those that speak and those that are spoken to’ (1978). That may sound a little utopian in the context of cultural studies, but is in fact a realistic demand for the impossible. It rejects the assumption that either academic discourse or the popular are ideal speech situations. We need to affirm the difference between such a utopian view and the pragmatics of actual work by fostering autonomous communicative practices which create their own spaces for exchange. Identity It is no accident that Morris has raised objections to cultural studies conceived in terms of an opposition between the academy and the popular while speaking in a feminist voice. From her point of view the objection to this relation is that it obscures voices on both sides of that divide. Her work is a process of creating spaces in which feminist voices can be heard (and can listen), somewhere between the popular and the academic. This is no simple task, for in refusing this mirror relationship which quite comfortably makes

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the popular both the foundational object of study and the subject addressed of academic discourse, Morris does not want to put another mirror relationship in its place along the lines of male discourse/feminist other. Nor does she want to sustain a monologue of resentment against the former. In moving beyond those kinds of strategy, Morris opens up a range of tactical-rhetorical options which may have a number of uses and implications. Let me continue with a passage from a classic Morris essay on a quintessentially ‘popular cultural text’, Australia Live, the four-hour transcontinental ‘celebration’ which appeared as television’s contribution to the Australian bicentenary in 1988 (Morris 1988d). Morris’s first move is to place the event in a genre, the genre of ‘panorama’. She then distinguishes two variants of the panorama, the imperial and the touristic. Where the former constructs the act of seeing as possessing, in the latter seeing is a ‘passing by’. These two modalities of the panorama, it should be noted, have a particular resonance in the Australian context, as both are genres in which the antipodean experience of landscape has been historically encoded. The essay will return to the difference between these two modalities of panorama, and hence a trajectory launched in its opening move. But before coming to that, the panorama has a couple of other jobs to perform. Firstly, Morris includes an account of the critical response to Australia Live in magazines and newspapers with her definition of its genre. For example, many criticisms drew attention to the lack of historical depth in Australia Live, when in fact this was simply a feature of the panorama as a genre: its relinquishment of historical continuity in favour of spatial grasp. The full significance of this move will become apparent later, but for the moment it is worth noting that Morris manages to bracket the ‘doxa’ surrounding the event in the media with the the event itself, thus extricating herself from the conventional criticism of the event. Morris sidesteps doxa defining the object differently: the ‘Australia Live effect’ is not an effect of television but of panorama—a genre which has both a current televisual form, but also prior ones to which it can be compared. Side-stepping the obvious (in order to sneak up on it from behind) is crucial to Morris. The true violence is that of the self evident’ (Barthes, 1989:83–5), and her method is the Barthesian move of paradox which shows that ‘in fact’, things are otherwise.5 Having accounted for the lack of historical resonance in Australia Live in terms of its generic properties, Morris can go on to say what role, in fact, it performs: ‘Australia Live had no commemorative, or even “nostalgic” aspirations whatsoever. It produced Australia as a space for visiting, investing, cruising, developing. Its basic theme was (capital) mobility. Comprehensive notes on the risks—drought, grasshopper plagues, restless natives—were included.’ The video cameras’ panoramic gaze produced ‘a landscape without shadows: a surveillance—space where nothing secret, mysterious, troubling or malcontent could find a place to lurk or hide’ (1988d:162). The panorama is a genre through which Morris makes us see the changing modalities of power.

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If the imperial panorama presented the image of the dominions as a possession to its imperial administrators, the touristic panorama shows off the acreage to potential real-estate developers. This relation to the land is fundamental, for it is at the centre of both the antipodean relation of politicaleconomic power and the culture of the antipodes as a lived relation to that power. Lest this seem overdrawn, compare Morris’s acerbic parody above with this straight-faced remark from The Financial Review: ‘It all sounds a trifle cold and calculating but facts are facts: one Japanese tourist is equal to 10 tonnes of wheat or 15 tonnes of coal, 5 tonnes of sugar, 7 tonnes of alumina or 60 tonnes of iron ore in real dollar terms’. In other words, Australia is a site f or the most primary and most tertiary of industries, for the extraction of raw rock and the manipulation of pure allure. Imports—and practically everything in this country is imported, from cars to cultural theories—have to be financed on the back of these precarious activities. Hence the pointed irony of Morris’s remarks—and her interest in tourism (1988e). Lest all this seem out of place in a cultural studies essay, which the division of academic labour tends to treat as a domain with a relatively absolute autonomy from the economic, it should be pointed out that only in a metropolitan country could the economic be separated from the cultural and the national from the international.6 The antipodean relation is one where no such separation is possible, for the national always hinges on a problematic relation to the international, and the cultural to a crisis-prone antipathy to the economic. Morris finds a writerly solution to this tight coupling in the antipodes of what the metropolitan discourses keep distinct by making a virtue of necessity. Her essays shift position and modality between the national and the international. They unerringly find the points at which power manifests itself in its absence, where its effect creates a void in discourse, where identity hangs precariously on the edge of an absent power. As an antipodean discourse, a Morris essay on Australia Live cannot help but address the leading metropolitan theories on the spectacle of the media event—Baudrillard and Jameson. The Australia Live bicentennial spectacle lent itself easily to such readings, as Morris points out. Critical distance was indeed foreclosed. The past did appear as nothing more than a genre of the present. It would be too easy to import these rhetorical tropes and apply them locally, to play the provincial-popular off against the metropolitan-theoretical. Easier still to critique this oh-so very colonial need to import the big picture theory to organize and interpret the local ‘scene’. This seems all to accord with the neo-colonial scheme of things. After showing the relevance of foreign theory for local events, and a mastery of both the theory and the act of interpreting the local through its lens, Morris shifts the roles—and the rules. The relevance of the local event is established and legitimated by its neat fit with the theory from the centres. Having established the local event as the minor, antipodean pole in relation to

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the theory, Morris has nevertheless established a relation and can begin to construct a theoretical vector which might work back in the other direction, from the antipode back again. Since the antipode is not a fixed space but a relational node, Morris makes Jameson and Baudrillard, ‘postmodern theory’, into an antipodean destination against which to ‘orient’ this writing. Unlike Baudrillard’s dazzling reversals and contaminations of paired terms, this reversal is not symmetrical.7 As in the classic rhetoric tradition Lyotard appeals to, rhetorical reversal is a tactic for building up the lesser term temporarily, ‘making the weaker case appear the stronger’, just enough to turn it against the dominant term in a binary pair.8 The degree to which one can reverse the vector of a theory is ultimately not a question of will but of institutional power. One can temporarily take up a speaking trajectory, back along its line, by looking for the gaps in its transmissions. Thus Morris says of Australia Live that it enacts a certain critical dilemma which is not at all unique to high theory. High theory is as symptomatic of a certain befuddling complexity as Australia Live. In either case, it is a question of how to read the discourse—not just the text—and the possibilities it opens out in the complex institutional matrix of discourses, sites and vectors. Morris states the problem in these terms: ‘There is no single “source” making sense of the world in communication with a captive audience. Complaints about collapsing standards (in aesthetic quality, in reality values, or in degrees of critical distance) are side effects of this process. It is not that aesthetic standards cannot be stated, historical reality asserted, or distance maintained (critics do these things all the time) but that there is no guarantee of “a” public who will care to validate the outcome, or be “mobilized” by the result’ (1988d: 186). This experience of a lack of common narrative, central authority, unity of place and time is, as Morris is slyly aware, an antipodean experience as much as it is a postmodern one. Critical theories of each and every genre have responded to this scenario by pondering and problematizing the problem of the relationship of text to subject. This experience even has a peculiarly Australian modality: ‘if it is now conventional for feminist essays to begin by questioning the place from which one speaks; it has also long been customary for Australian essays to pose the question of speaking of place’ (Morris, 1984:42). The proliferation of media vectors is making the experience of the problem of textuality—rendered as a problematic relation to place—a more and more common experience. The gaps and silences in metropolitan discourse—including cultural studies—occur when it confronts this proliferation of relations to others. It is in this break in transmission that the space exists for antipodean theory. Every vector creates a new antipode. As the volume and velocity of vectors being made and unmade increases, the tyranny of difference proliferates. Not only are new antipodes created and reached, their promise and danger realized only too soon, they also disappear more rapidly as well. The other comes… and goes. The old reciprocities between the imperial strategy and the

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antipodean counter-site, the old uneven dialogues which gave the appearance of community and communication, disperse into a myriad of lines: good, bad, crossed and engaged (Ronell, 1989). There is something lost here, hence the theory of nostalgia and the nostalgia of theory which is one of the common modalities of the postmodern. Yet there are also possibilities here. It is the possibilities which Morris chooses to respond to. The imperial mode of discourse really has nothing to offer its antipodes, hence the mourning and nostalgia might set the tone at the centre, but at the end of the line it can only be cause for celebration. Irruption All authority in antipodean experience is either too close and too shallow or too distant and too obscure to have any real effects. One either worships imperial power or resents it—both relations at a distance. In the essays of Meaghan Morris, there is a playful, self-conscious version of this dilemma of authority as it appears from the antipodean end of the line. Indeed, there is an ironic version of the whole antipodean neurosis about identity in these texts. Morris writes in a manner which is self-consciously antipodean but which does not necessarily have anything to do with being Australian. It is antipodean in the sense that Morris writes from the perspective of the minor term in any and every vectoral equation. She writes in what appears to be the first person, but a first person which is clearly presented as a rhetorical construct, for all the apparently revealing and seductive intimacy of the voice. Her writing is very concerned with discovering what spaces in language can be enacted besides a staging of authority, i.e., besides what Paul Carter (1988) calls imperial writing. What she does not do is position herself as the great other, the great excluded, oppressed, unloved, unwashed other term which resents and berates the master discourse. Rather, Morris approaches writing tactically. Her essays are premised on the assumption that there are always a great number of possible trajectories which can be opened up at will within the imperium of discourse. Not all of these positions are equally possible or equally effective. This is no vague call to a plurality of discourse (itself a neo-imperium— legitimatized with reference to canonical texts and techniques). For example, in discussing the problem of ‘identity’ in both feminist and antipodean discourse, Morris finds a connection between the two in opposition to an American figure of Identity: Identity—for many Australians—is a concept invested with the sanctity that Americans can accord to the Self. It can have a similar function in feminist discourse, defining both an object of quests and a site for scrutiny. But Identity has a social, rather than a psychological resonance —evoking mysteries of sex, class, race and place rather than those of

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ego and individuality. Identity is a cohesive, gregarious force. Yet Identity is assumed to be fictitious; to talk Identity is to indulge in (not necessarily frivolous) acts of improvisation (1984:44). Here Morris juxtaposes a number of trajectories which give rise to antipodal formations: American imperial vs. peripheral; phallocentric vs. feminist. She problematizes them by showing how they intersect, how each and every experience of an antipodal relation and an identity which stands at one or other pole of it suffers from the irruption of other points of difference within it. There can be no speaking ‘position’ now that so many discourses intersect so frequently, only speaking trajectories. In discussing theories of female spectatorship in feminist screen theory, Morris observes that the concept of female spectator had a useful tactical significance in relation to the imperial conception of the male gaze. ‘In these contexts, “female” has polemical force rather than essentialist significance.’ Thus the female spectator intersects and interrupts the male gaze-female body line of thought. Having made this interruption, the female-spectator concept can be used to plot a new line, a new antipode—the feminist film text. At this point in the text, Morris improvises a move which interrupts the new femalespectator/feminist-film trajectory. About the female spectator, she notes that I am uncomfortable with two other developments related to the use of this term. One is the notion of the female spectator as a strategy for feminist cinema. I find it hard to say why I am wary of this, and so I’m certainly interested in it. It’s partly a matter of the American-ness of the contexts in which it so often appears, and of an intimate or intimist Americanness, which disturbs me when even the slightest gesture is made toward specifying a value (no matter how abstract or ‘hypothetical’) for ‘female’. ‘Disturbs me’ is probably too strong: I have a sensation of distancing similar to the bemusement I feel in other contexts when American feminism speaks of ‘the self’ (or properties like ‘personal space’)—and I’m fairly sure I don’t have one of those and I’m not sure I want one (1990b). The other thing Morris is uncomfortable with in the term ‘female spectator’ involves a quite different interruption along a quite different axis. In the work of John Fiske, for example, the ‘female spectator’ is something which derives pleasure f rom the consumption of certain genres of television such as soap opera (see, e.g., Fiske, 1987: chapter 10). Where she would interrupt the passage from female spectator to feminist film by pointing out how the dominant pole of ‘American-ness’ is implicated in it, she would interrupt another line which passes from female spectator to consumptive pleasure by pointing out the masculine assumption that the female spectator is simply the consumer on the end of a different genre of products. Hence each trajectory

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has a multiple of adjacent points which begin and terminate, often in the same object or subject, but which can be tactically differentiated from each other. Almost all of her essays have points at which the speaking-position, the I of the text, slips from one tactical beach-head to another. Indeed the whole text can sometimes be composed to make these slippages possible. In ‘Politics now’ a paper originally given at a conference with a decidedly ‘political’ flavour—Morris positions herself as a petit bourgeois intellectual, pitting her faint-hearted persona against the militants who would speak the part of the working class, but she also differentiates herself from the ruling class. She speaks as the antipodes’ antipode. An antipode, after all, exists relative to some vector from a site of power and presence. As the sites of discursive power multiply, so too do the antipodean points each identifies as the other pole, towards which it orients itself. These traceries intersect and overlap, making possible a mobile, antipodean strategy—in theoretical practice at least. The petit bourgeois figure is a refreshingly candid one (see Morris, 1990a: 473–4). It makes excellent use of the ambivalence created by the oscillation between theoretical trajectories. Neither too ‘privileged’ nor too ‘popular’, and certainly not so powerful as to be capable of strategic control over the space of culture and its technologies, the petit bourgeois ‘makes the best of things’, and as de Certeau (1988) points out, is capable of heroism in small affairs.9 The essayistic style of Morris, like the tactical tricks de Certeau discovers within the space of disciplinary power, have a certain irreducible and singular way of insinuating themselves into the discipline. The reading of de Certeau that Morris offers is a radical one for cultural studies, for the minor, tactical mode is not just its object of disciplinary study but its method. Like Ross Gibson’s reading of Mad Max, this would be a ‘new beginning’, in that it does not reify any particular vector. It does not concentrate solely on the spatial antipode of Australia, or the gendered antipode of the feminine, or the class antipode of the petit bourgeois. Nor is it a matter of pulping all of them together in a plural soup. It is a question of moving tactically along one cultural trajectory and then off on another. In this manner, Morris traverses the fragments and detritus of academic discourses just as Max negotiates the remnants of old movies and Australian myths littering the desert. In either case, a strategy for movement, a joyous circulation, is posed as a writerly response to the proliferation of media vectors and its affects. As I have been indicating, I think historically this response arises from the development of vectors which breached the distance between Australia and its old dominant pole, the ‘motherland’, which ended the ‘tyranny of distance’. Rather than an Oedipal rupture with the source, as in the old radical national formations, the proliferation of vectors in the late seventies and eighties called for the exploration of any and every multi-national line in and out of the place. In place of the search for a speaking position. Morris constructs speaking trajectories: the I of the text moves tactically across the lines constructed in

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the text by the crossed wires which are the result of a myriad of vectors traversing the same ground. As Paul Virilio (1988) asks, when we can go to the antipodes and back in an instant, what will become of us? As the media vector which brought us Australia Live, the Gulf War, or the Tiananmen Square massacre demonstrates, the age of the instant vectoral connection between the antipode and its other has already arrived. The instability between these poles oscillates nightly on TV. What becomes of cultural identity when the breathing spaces which regulate the paranoid reaction of cultural identity to its external bearings collapses into the time of the televisual edit? What becomes of meaning when there are not shared codes and conventions? The answers, I think, ought to come from the antipodes. From the antipodean point of view, Morris gives us a way with the other’s grammar in which to phrase a response other than silence, resentment, paranoia and the fixed stare into mirrors which are no longer fixed but electronically mobile. We no longer have roots, we have aerials. This condition predicates a new mode of inquiry and new speaking trajectories. It requires a writing that is, to borrow a phrase from Gregory Bateson, the difference that makes a difference. Notes 1 Lawrence Grossberg (1989) unpacks this unduly condensed description. 2 Perhaps cultural studies needs to be written about the way Greil Marcus (1991) writes about the proliferation of the Elvis virus through popular cultures. 3 This is something I tried to show elsewhere (Wark, 1989) in relation to the performative enactment of community and loss in the example of a secular funeral. 4 See the interview ‘between’ Stephen Muecke and Meaghan Morris in Outside the Book (1991). 5 To the extent that Morris engages with other authors by writing with them, then her relation to Barthes can be tracked through Morris, 1988c and 1991b. 6 On the problem of reconnecting cultural studies to some sense of economic discourse and economic processes, see Wark (1991c). 7 What Morris has in common with Baudrillard is a concentration on solutions to contemporary critical problems at the level and through the techniques of rhetoric. The similarity begins and ends there. Where Baudrillard sets up pairs of terms which then contaminate each other, flipping over into their opposites, demonstrating the futility of classical critical strategies in a postcritical world, Morris’s essays set up rhetorical categories which form a series, along which analysis self-consciously slides. See her two essays on Baudrillard (1988 a and f). 8 Morris’s interest in Lyotard can be traced in ‘Postmodernity and Lyotard’s sublime’, in Morris (1988f). 9 Morris discusses de Certeau in Morris (1988e).

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References Barthes, Roland (1989) Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, New York: Noonday. Carter, Paul (1988) The Road to Botany Bay, New York: Knopf. de Certeau, Michel (1988) The Practice of Everyday Life, Berkeley: University ofCalifornia Press. Financial Review, 8 February 1988. Fiske, John (1987) Television Culture, London: Methuen. Gibson, Ross (1985) ‘Yondering: a reading of Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome’, Art & Text, 19. Grossberg, Lawrence (1989) ‘Formations of cultural studies: an American in Birmingham’, Strategies, 2,114–49. Jameson, Fredric (1991) Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, London: Verso. Lawson, Sylvia (1987) The Archibald Paradox: A Strange Case of Authorship, Melbourne: Penguin. Marcus, Greil (1991) Dead Elvis: A Chronicle of a Cultural Obsession, New York: Viking Penguin. Michaels, Eric (1990) Unbecoming: An AIDS Diary, Sydney: EMPress. Morris, Meaghan (1978) ‘Eurocommunism vs. sociological delinquency’, in Foss, Paul and Morris, Meaghan, editors, Language, Sexuality and Subversion, Working Papers Collection 1, Sydney: Feral Publications, 47–76. ——(1984) ‘Identity anecdotes’, Camera Obscura, 12. ——(1988a) ‘Banality in cultural studies’, Discourse, 10(2). ——(1988b) ‘Things to do with shopping centres’, in Sheridan, Susan, editor, Grafts: Feminist Cultural Criticism, London: Verso. ——(1988c) ‘Sydney Tower’, Transition: Discourse on Architecture, 25 (Winter). ——(1988d) ‘The live, the dead and the living’, in Foss, Paul, editor, Island in the Stream: Myths of Place in Australian Culture, Sydney: Pluto Press. ——(1988e) ‘At Henry Parkes Motel’, Cultural Studies, 2(1). ——(1988f) The Pirate’s Fiancée, London: Verso. ——(1990a) ‘A small serve of spaghetti’, Meanjin, 49(3). ——(1990b) [Contribution to ‘The Spectatrix’ special issue], Camera Obscura, 20/21. ——(1991a) [Reply to Graeme Turner], Meanjin, 50(1). ——(1991b) ‘Metamorphoses at Sydney Tower’, New Formations, 11. Morris, Meaghan and Freadman, Ann (1981) ‘Import rhetoric: “Semiotics in/and Australia”’, The Foreign Bodies Papers, Local Consumption Series, 1, Sydney, 122– 53. Muecke, Stephen and Morris, Meaghan (1991) Outside the Book, Sydney: Local Consumption Press. Ronell, Avital (1989) The Telephone Book, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Taylor, Paul (1982) ‘Antipodality’, Art & Text, 6,49–60. Turner, Graeme (1991) ‘Return to Oz’, Meanjin, 50(1) [with replies by Meaghan Morris and Chris Wallace-Crabbe], Wark, McKenzie (1988) ‘On technological time: cruising Virilio’s overexposed city’, Arena, 83, 82–100. ——(1989) ‘Just like a prayer’, Meanjin, 48(2), 298–309.

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——(1990a) ‘Vectors of memory…seeds of fire: the Western media and the Beijing demonstrations’, New Formations, 10, 1–12. ——(1990b) ‘Europe’s masked ball: East meets West at the Wall’, New Formations, 12 (Winter), 492–501. ——(1991a) ‘News bites: War TV in the Gulf’, Meajin 51(1), 5–18. ——(1991b) ‘From Fordism to Sonyism: perverse readings of the new world order’, New Formations, 15 (Winter) 43–54. ——(1991c) ‘Fashioning the Future’, Cultural Studies, 5(1), 61–76. Virilio, Paul (1988) ‘The overexposed city’, Zone, 1/2.

JOHN HARTLEY

EXPATRIATION: USEFUL ASTONISHMENT AS CULTURAL STUDIES

Fatherland—a quintessence My father…called himself English, or rather, an Englishman, usually bitterly, and when reading the newspapers: that is, when he felt betrayed, or wounded in his moral sense. I remember thinking it all rather academic, living as we did in the backveld. However, I did learn early on that while the word English is tricky and elusive enough in England, it is nothing to the variety of meanings it might bear in a Colony, self-governing or otherwise (Lessing, 1960/68:7–8). That was Doris Lessing, at the outset of a quest she chronicles in a ‘documentary’ book, In Pursuit of the English. Her perspective locates Englishness in her father, in media (newspapers), and not so much in England the place as in England the ‘moral sense’, so that Englishness resides not in a country (fatherland), but in a style of criticism, literally patriarchal, which may be more legible on the other side of the planet—in her case post-war Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe)—than in its original home. All this is interesting (see Hartley, 1991), but no less interesting are the forms of knowing that are hinted at in the passage quoted above. Lessing’s ‘in pursuit’ suggests an object of knowledge that is distant and fugitive; it’s also ‘elusive’, ‘tricky’ and capable of a ‘variety of meanings’, depending on which gender, generation or hemisphere it comes from, and on who hears it. Some knowledge appears to be devoid of meaning or utility altogether; that is, to be ‘academic’. Even though she was writing in 1960 about the late forties, Lessing’s methods are postmodernist or at least poststructuralist: she has to ‘learn early on’ polysemic meanings and the failure to mean at all; to understand something by first considering it at a distance; to enquire after the meaning of home by looking at foreign; to check on her own identity by trying to make sense of her father’s evident madness (Englishness); and to

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know from the outset that her quest, the ‘pursuit’ of her title, is futile. She writes: My life has been spent in pursuit. So has everyone’s, of course. I chase love and fame all the time. I have chased, on and off. . . the workingclass and the English…. Like love and fame, it [the work-class, and by ‘clear analogy’ the English] is a platonic image, a grail, a quintessence, and by definition, unattainable. (1960/68:12)1 Ex patria However unattainable, knowledge is nevertheless worth pursuing, and for those who are interested, Englishness is too; but in both cases ‘pursuit’ means just that—following them to their destinations rather than their origins: ‘for real perception into the side-channels of British culture one has to go to a university in Australia or South Africa’ (Lessing, 1960/68:35). The pursuit of knowledge can thus be thought of as a form of expatriation, which itself is about migratory identities, national and personal, and about the ‘side-channels of culture’. It is also about the uncertain, transient, migratory, mixed-up character of knowledge, which, when it continues to be regarded in terms of origins and not of destinations, can remain as elusive as the English. In f act, one early lesson learnt by Doris Lessing was that origins, authenticity and the English are not very good at identifying themselves at all: It has been so dinned into them [the English] that their cooking, their heating arrangements, their love-making, their behaviour abroad and their manners at home are beneath even contempt, though certainly not comment, that like Bushmen in the Kalahari, the doomed race, they vanish into camouflage at the first sign of a stranger (9). The classic imperial English; self-effacing at home, self-aggrandizing abroad. A doomed race perhaps, doomed to Europeanity after 1992, but one whose identity is complicated by the fact that Englishness is not confined to the English; not only is there an extensive diaspora of British people, but more importantly English is the predominant language of international exchange, not least in the realm of knowledge, where it is the lingua franca of global intellectual culture. Englishness thus becomes a problem for more than just the English, expatriation an issue for international intellectual exchange in general. The flying doctors Expatriation is a loaded term, arousing both comment and contempt, yoked too closely to the image of classic imperial Englishmen like Doris Lessing’s

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father; a fate from which it needs rescuing. Australia, for instance, is a country which wouldn’t exist and doesn’t make sense without expatriation; it is the norm, not the exception, for all but its Aboriginal inhabitants. The term also demonstrates the power of deixis; here in Australia an expatriate is someone who leaves; Germaine Greer, Robert Hughes, Patrick White, Clive James, John Pilger—offshore intellectuals guaranteed to infuriate their landlocked compatriots whenever they pass judgement (without bothering to pass Customs). But here is also someone else’s there; Australia as destination, where expatriation means going away from patria—fatherland—a term that combines nation, family, gender and patriarchy all in one. Going away from such powerful signifiers as those is not just a matter of movement; it’s dislocating, disorientating. The term expatriation not only extends, with varying degrees of approval, to all immigrants, emigrants and migrants, but it is also available as a metaphor, perhaps even a suggestion, for cultural studies. It’s a term of displacement, a condition which is risky, unsettling, puzzling, invigorating— and normal—in the domain of knowledge. Cultural studies, for example, is a kind of intellectual Australia; a big country, with few inhabitants, that no one from elsewhere cares much about, modestly poised on the edge of the known epistemological universe, full of expatriates of relatively recent arrival, for whom the local landmarks are perplexing, even upside down, and whose own intellectual patrimony turns out not to be fully convertible currency in the new economy of sense-making. Looking at new things with new eyes, saying new things in new ways— this is both harder and rarer than it appears, as the history of the European colonization of Australia attests (see esp. Moorehead, 1966; Hughes, 1987). But it is fundamental to cultural studies, whose practitioners are ever on the move away from the home nation (patria), or from government by ancestral fathers (patriarchy), both literal and metaphorical, personal and social. Many cultural critics turn out to be literal or metaphorical migrants—observers who are themselves the ‘other’ of a ‘native’ location, who explore it, see it with new ideas, and draw conclusions with the necessary caution and provisionality of the immigrant. The ‘expatriate intellectual’ is thus much more than a description of those people who have literally left home; it is offered here as a category to describe those who undertake cultural studies. Disciplinary, gender and theoretical displacements, as well as mere geographical ones, are one of the distinctive features of that interdisciplinary trade, whose practitioners are united only in dispersal, a diaspora of differentiators. Expatriation in cultural studies is identifiable as migratory writing and principled uncertainty in the exploration of exchange. There were certainly plenty of practitioners of both literal and metaphorical kinds of expatriation who gathered for the ‘Dismantle’ conference, doing what we do best; dropping into an isolated community with mixed emotions and a bag of

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tricks, trying to cope with life on the move while coming up with a symptomatology of everyday life, accounting for here by looking at there, without, hopefully, upsetting the locals too much. So let’s celebrate expatriate intellectuals, let’s give ourselves an honorary title, let’s hear it for The Flying Doctors. As David Lodge might have put it, nice work if you can get it. The Shakespearian multitude In pursuit of both knowledge and Englishness, but not of origins and authenticity, rather of destinations and exchange, it becomes necessary to

cross the great binary divide from the genuine, original, or authentic to their ‘others’. Perhaps there is no choice, for Doris Lessing was right; at the first sight of a stranger the English can vanish, taking with them even their popular culture. Here for instance are the opening words of a King Penguin (a prestige-popular imprint) published as long ago as 1945, called Popular English Art:

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If a visitor to this country [England] desired to be shown the Popular Arts of England we should have to say, if we were honest, that there are now virtually none, and that for a long while they have been in a sad decline. (Carrington, 1945)2 Perhaps that authoritative denial of origins is spur enough to cross the great divide, or in Australia’s case the Great Dividing Range, where, as far away from its origin as it is possible to get, you eventually come to a quintessence of Englishness, of popular art and politics, all rolled into one. It’s in Queensland, midway between two little places called Ilfracombe (mythical English Devon) and Jericho (mythical Biblical devastation); it is The Shakespeare, a pub in Barcaldine, bardic origin of Australian democratic politics, the very place where the Australian Labor Party (the ALP) was founded in 1891, one hundred years ago.3 Such a destination for Englishness is perhaps not so foreign after all, if Popular English Art is to be believed. It includes in its artistic canon a print of 1793, showing ‘ONE of the SWINISH MULTITUDE’, i.e., a member of the popular classes. The multitude in question was excluded from both knowledge and the constitution by Edmund Burke, but it was spurred into unprecedented political activism by Tom Paine in the Rights of Man, which was itself published one hundred years before the ALP was founded in The Shakespeare.4 Commenting on the genre, Popular English Art says: There is a vitality in these prints, as well as a coarseness and brutality, which has not been seen in English art since their day, and they reflect to perfection the popular feeling on social and political issues. In the strictest sense they were the popular art of their time, as genuinely as were Giotto or Breughel in earlier centuries. (Carrington, 1945:23) The (self-represented) swinish multitude is claimed as true origin: the ‘genuinely popular tradition with a social—one might almost say socialist— purpose’ (10). And this is what is reinvented in country Queensland, perhaps less well known than it should be for such virtues as democratic politics, popular arts, and Englishness—a subversive kind of Englishness; grumpy, rebellious, unhealthy, seditious, disorientated—the kind that was once transported ‘beyond the seas’ whether it wanted to go or not. Queensland is in fact not only ‘home’ of the (federal) ALP, but also the state which elected the world’s first Labour government. Ramsgation In Fremantle, venue of the 1991 ‘Dismantle’ cultural studies conference, as in Queensland on the opposite side of Australia, cultural bearings may be perplexing as markers of location and identity. Due west from Fremantle

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there is nothing but ocean, until you make landfall midway between a place called East London and two small coastal towns called Ramsgate and Margate. There are two small seaside resorts in England also called Ramsgate and Margate; the biggest features of both are the amusement arcades, designed for the summer holiday-makers from East London. Ramsgate boasts Pleasurama, while Margate flaunts Dreamland. But the Ramsgate, Margate and East London on Fremantle’s latitude are a different kind of dreamland altogether; they’re in South Africa, a destination for Englishness which occupies the opposite political pole from the Queensland variety. It so happens that at about the same distance to the east of Fremantle, on the other side of Australia, is not subtropical Queensland but another Ramsgate. It is in the middle of Botany Bay in Sydney, facing the airport, a little beach resort, protected with shark nets, nearly over the very spot where Europeans first set their colonizing foot on this continent. So ‘here’— Fremantle—is midway between two rather different Ramsgates, neither being ‘original’, but both standing symbolically on the margins of opposing outcomes for the displaced Englishness they have relocated to incommensurate antipodean destinations. But perhaps this mutual disconnection is just an example of the increasing ‘Ramsgation’ of the world, where the primary function of entire localities is to recycle meanings; dismantling the old realisms of primary industry, shifting whole economies from production (origin) to consumption (destination), detaching the Rams from the gates, if you like, replacing the export of sheep5 with the import of cultural tourists, which is not the same thing, rededicating places to the new industry of expatriation for pleasure. In such a landscape, the dissociation of signifier from referent, form from function, that has been noticed in textual systems from philosophy to architecture, can be seen to extend to whole communities—cities are not authenticated by their origins, their buildings don’t mean what they say and reality cannot be presumed by looking at a place and saying ‘that’s a port’,6 or ‘that’s a prison’,7 or even ‘those are people’, for the port is a tourist attraction, the prison a heritage development, and the people are cultural curators and costumed extras, rehearsed and eager to strut their stuff as actors.8 Ramsgation, which may also be called Fremantling, turns places into Pleasuramas, reality into a sideshow, and symbolic identity into an import/ export commodity. Desert islands and young Australians One of the great cultural institutions of the English language, the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), has for fifty years been broadcasting a radio show which is about both desert islands and the internationalization of Englishness—Desert Island Discs. This show premiered in 1942, and, outliving its creator Roy Plomley,9 it still provides the English common

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listener with a perennially intriguing puzzle: what eight records, one luxury and one book would you take to your desert island? This being Englishness, it is a convention of the programme that the Bible and Shakespeare are already there (as a kind of portable origin for Englishness), but, this being Australia, it must be remembered that the Bible and Shakespeare are not imaginary origins but real destinations, just down the road from Ilfracombe on the Capricorn Highway; Jericho and The Shakespeare. Doubtless many castaways would prefer their Shakespeare in the form of a pub, and Meaghan Morris (1988a) has shown that a hotel can be ‘read’ (even in terms of national origins), though in her case it was a motel.10 The Bible and Shakespeare are obvious enough symbols of English authenticity for the BBC’s imaginary desert island, but they are transformed into something quite different (not English culture but labour politics) in such destinations as Queensland, where even the status of destinations is far from final. In fact the Capricorn Highway is ‘destined’ not for Biblical Jericho, Shakespearian Barcaldine or English Ilfracombe, but for Longreach, itself a mythologized birthplace, this time of the self-proclaimed ‘Spirit of Australia’, quintessence of a migrant continent; the national airline Qantas.11 Australia is, among other things, the biggest desert island in the world. Except for migrants to Australia, the question of what textual icons of national identity to take to a desert island is not normally a practical problem. But one such could be Roy Plomley’s own book Desert Island Lists (1984) which records every disc, book and luxury chosen by over 1700 ‘castaways’, adding up to an inventory of broadcast taste, a kind of ship’s manifest for the export of respectable Englishness to the ends of the earth. There is, however, no antipodean (in)version of Desert Island Discs, which is perhaps not surprising: how would you like to be shipped off to a small, cold, wet, populous, disputatious island, washed ashore under the off-white cliffs of Ramsgate,12 say, with only a bagful of sounds and words to remind you of home, and one luxury to remind you of civilization, while you try to cope with the primitive culture of Pleasurama? Unthinkable. And anyway, you wouldn’t get past Immigration. No, the British Isles are not interchangeable with desert isles, not the stuff that those kinds of dreams are made of, as the youthful Doris Lessing soon discovered. In fact any nation’s identity is an import/export commodity, and there’s an international traffic in national images. But there is not a balance of trade; Australia, like many other countries, is still a net importer, despite the frequent export of members of its own entertainment industry to Britain and the USA, including singers, actors, TV presenters, art critics, musicians, TV series and media tycoons, from Kylie Minogue, who’s had as long in the British charts as The Beatles did, to Rupert Murdoch, who owns as many American corporations as it takes to become a US citizen. But still there’s a lot of ground to make up, for Englishness has been exported to Australia over a long period. Here for example is an old children’s Christmas annual, called Young

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Australia, but published in London in the 1920s, whose cover (see over) is a visualization of expatriation—pirates bringing their treasure chests to a desert island, or Europeans colonizing Australia, or even cultural studies exporting theory (see Morris, 1988b). One of the stories in Young Australia is about ‘Life in the Australian bush’ by ‘A Pommy’, who’s supposed to have left his happy home and work ‘to try my luck out here in Western Australia’, where he chops down the native bush for wheat, and where ‘I have to-day met the good ship “Orvieto” in Fremantle harbour, and on board her was the sweetest little lady in the world…and tomorrow we’re to be married at Perth cathedral.’ Despite having imported something that can only be described as female, ‘A Pommy’ concludes with this: Yes, it’s a man’s life out here for sure! I take off my cap to Australia. Here you can live every hour of the day, because you’ve health, invigorating work, and fine prospects. So come along, you fine, strapping boys from old England. Come and join us! There’s room for everybody with will and grit and muscle. This call to expatriation is not a call to change; it’s a story about the implantation of patriarchal Englishness in conditions where it might thrive even better than on its ‘native’ soil. But A Pommy feels changes, nevertheless, brought on by spending ‘so long in the wilds’. He says: I feel very shy of this busy city…I am dazed by the traffic, dazzled by the lights, stunned by the noise, and electrified by the ladies’ dainty dresses (c. 1928:9–12). The city in question is Perth; hardly the great metropolis, in fact hardly a city at all in 1928, but this is a story of cultural comparison, an incentive to bodily sensation, where will and grit is rewarded with wife and wheat, and where expatriation feels a bit like an afternoon at Dreamland amusement park, after you’ve put your strapping young body into a crisis of orientation on all the dizziest rides; you feel dazed, dazzled, stunned and electrified. Meanwhile, down in Fremantle harbour, site of the ‘Dismantle’ conference, yet another expat theorist is lugging a treasure chest of knowledge up the beach, containing not only the cultural baggage of everyday understandings but a professional toolkit of theoretical and conceptual apparatus, which may turn out to be useful, or alternatively to be a mere box of baubles whose value to the locals is nil.

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Class and quality The expatriate cultural critic has to tread warily, and trade cautiously. In Britain, for instance, the study of culture has had two abiding themes which have

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structured debate both within cultural studies and more generally in the public domain, and those two themes are class and quality. They’ve been around since the mid-nineteenth century, and they’re very closely connected with each other. In a word, culture is the antidote to class. The theme of industrialization (class) as dehumanizing, and culture (quality) as counterrevolution, was well established by the time Matthew Arnold immortalized it in 1869 in Culture and Anarchy, and W.E.Forster institutionalized it in the Education Act of 1870; for instance it was explicit a generation earlier, although with opposing ideological connotations, in Marx and Engels’ 1848 Communist Manifesto.13 A century later it became the starting point for the critique we now call British cultural studies,14 with the work of Williams and Hoggart. The critique of Arnoldian binarism (culture versus class) had the unforeseen consequence of reinvigorating it; turning it upside down perhaps by insisting on the quality of popular culture, but thereby suffusing another generation’s intellectual formation with the theme. Especially in relation to the most important media of drama and journalism, this theme of class vs. quality competes for the status of a ‘dominant ideology’. The media, in fact culture in general, are explained by reference to class and quality, which between them seem to account for the mode of production, the textuality and the social ef fect of culture. The media and popular culture are the battleground for the politics of culture which in this context is the struggle between class and quality. Culture and coal But the politics of culture rested on a deeper seam, namely coal. Before he could have cultural criticism, Matthew Arnold had to separate culture from coal: Our coal, thousands of people were saying, is the real basis of our national greatness; if our coal runs short, there is an end of the greatness of England. But what is greatness?—culture makes us ask. Greatness is a spiritual condition worthy to excite love, interest, and admiration…. Well, then, what an unsound habit of mind it must be which makes us talk of things like coal or iron as constituting the greatness of England, and how salutary a friend is culture. (In Jennings, 1987:319) The Arnoldian vision of culture as quality is familiar still, as is his opposition to the use of the economy (coal and iron) as a yardstick for measuring national prowess. Less well remembered, perhaps, is the position Arnold opposed; the vision of coal which bespoke a different concept of culture, based on exchange, destination, and the socialistic tendencies of the economy. Here’s a glimpse of it, as dreamed by one who stood and meditated on ‘that most

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poetical and most practical of the grand achievements of the human intellect’, the Liverpool to Manchester Railway: I should fear to tell the dreams which I have now beside the electric telegraph, and on the railways, and within the regions of the god-like inventors and makers of machinery. There is a time coming when realities shall go beyond any dreams that have yet been told of these things. Nation exchanging with nation their products freely; thoughts exchanging themselves for thoughts and never taking note of the geographical space they have to pass over…; man holding free fellowship with man without taking note of the social distance which used to separate them…Universal enfranchisement, railways, electric telegraphs, public schools…15 That was written by ‘One Who Has Whistled at the Plough’, and published in 1848; a visionary year. The Autobiography of a Working Man also called for ‘moral electricity’ to connect the opposing classes—‘landed lord or cotton lord’ with ‘the working men’s end of the social world’. The plough-whistler’s destination is a reality beyond dreamland, a utopia made possible by coal, exchange and the international migration of products and thoughts on the instantaneous ether of moral electricity. It’s a place where the ‘makers of machinery’ are not seen as the enemies of culture but the creators of culture. And this utopia does sound remarkably like Queensland, which is ‘beautiful one day, perfect the next’, and whose major export is coal. But of course the Arnoldian vision of culture has survived too; in Australia as elsewhere its ideology has played a part in structuring cultural policy, especially in the areas of arts subsidy and public service broadcasting, where it has achieved the status of mainstream common sense. Despite its longevity, the separation of class and quality is inappropriate in Australia, where Arnoldianism serves only its original purpose of continuing class struggle in the cultural domain, in circumstances which bear little resemblance to those imagined by Arnold. Analyzing, and thence subsidizing, Australian culture in terms of class, and Australian media in terms of quality, simply doesn’t work. For instance, Tom O’Regan (1986) has shown that the so-called ‘film of worth and quality’ of the 1970s, i.e. Picnic at Hanging Rock and its emulators, which tried to combine Australianness of location, story, accent, and culture with the prestige of international art cinema, ended up as an aberration—the middle-class nostalgia film. That is to say, the reduction of Australianness to class and quality can occur, as public policy, influencing production right through from funding and crewing to marketing and reviewing, but when it does happen it results in the exclusion from Australianness of popular entertainment like the ‘ocker film’, or international blockbusters like Mad Max II and Crocodile Dundee. It also excludes Australian productions that

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don’t ‘look’ Australian; while Hollywood movies can be set anywhere and any time from LA to a Galaxy Long Ago and Far Away, and still count as American, a Paul Cox film set in Greece suddenly finds itself of doubtful national status; it’s on the ‘wrong’ (desert) Island. Finally, and most importantly, it excludes most Australians too, since officially promoted national identity circulates in minority productions; an Australianness ‘aimed at a minority segment of a minority cultural form’. Identity and exchange Instead of Arnoldian class and quality, two other themes seem to predominate in Australian culture at large, themes which are much closer to the vision of the plough-whistling Working Man; they are identity and exchange. Not only is a major strand of writing about Australian media concerned with questions of national identity, but the media themselves, in both structure and content, emphasize the same issue, and cultural policies (such as the Australian Broadcasting Tribunal’s controversial ‘Australian look’ requirement for commercial TV) promote it further. Meanwhile, the theme of exchange is an ever present but sometimes unstated opposition to identity, in the shape of the question of imports. So it’s not a matter of culture being equated with the support of art, film, etc. as such, but of Australian versions of these things, and that means policing Australian imports of overseas culture, and promoting Australian exports to the international image market (see Miller, 1991; also Ang, 1991). Class and quality are often encountered in an adversarial relation to each other in British cultural discourses, so much so that it was a hundred years before anyone beyond themselves noticed that the industrialized popular (as opposed to ‘folk’) classes even had a culture. Similarly the themes of identity and exchange are in competition if not contradiction in Australia. Cultural nationalism is appropriate for questions of identity, but not necessarily for questions of exchange, where it leads to protectionism, restricted practices, and a form of censorship by quota. If Arnold doesn’t travel well, there’s no a priori reason to suppose his critics will either. Cultural studies is not simply portable as an intellectual ‘master discourse’ that can be plucked from the treasure chest by the globetrotting theorist to flourish at the suitably amazed natives of foreign shores. Its utility remains an open question. Questions of quality, as well as those of class, remain far from settled, even in the ‘home’ territory where both Arnoldianism and its critique originated. Obviously some critical work will prove invaluable, even in circumstances quite different from those first envisaged in it, but equally there remains a question as to whether the founding terms—class and quality—are useful or distorting when shipped ‘beyond the seas’. British cultural studies is noteworthy for struggling against ‘English’ itself; the discourses of quality associated with academic literary criticism. British

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cultural studies sought (and still seeks) to emancipate the whole intellectual domain from the hegemony of the literary canon and its evaluations and discriminations, moving instead to an analysis based, at first exclusively, on class, and specifically on how culture, communication and media reproduce class structures in their institutional set-ups, and promote unequal social relations in their textual regimes. This theme has itself changed in various ways; once the move was made from quality to class, there were plenty of ‘classes’ to think about, and soon it was not just the traditional working classes whose cultural production and consumption was under investigation, but also subcultures, women, ethnic minorities and regions. Only then did a return to quality seem possible; tentatively, questions about it are just beginning to re-enter the realm of the speakable in cultural studies (see Brunsdon, 1990), especially in relation to ‘quality’ television, which, by critical consensus (though not by informed debate), seems to refer to MTM and Late Night Live (USA), Channel Four and Edge of Darkness (UK), or SBS and Kennedy Miller (Australia). Naturally, there is no agreed theory, no general method, no formal analysis to sustain such conclusions; questions of quality remain open, even as questions, for situations where the ‘British’ move from quality to class and back again has not been so crucial as in the UK itself. Pom-posity International intellectual exchange is of course both inevitable and useful, but sometimes the destination can be discomfiting for the traveller. For instance, cultural studies reserves a very special place for popular culture and popular reality. But the compliment may not be returned, and the professor of popular culture is a stranger in that very domain. Jim Collins has commented on the status of ‘academic discourse’ within television: [It] retains a certain weight and propriety on news and arts programs, but within the situation comedies and dramatic programs of prime-time fiction it is constantly equated with pomposity, chicanery and outright deception. Within the hierarchy of languages constructed by these television discourses, academic discourse often seems to rank somewhere below used-car sales pitches. (1989:25) The academic study of popular culture is itself a kind of migration, and the traveller should certainly be aware that in that country the expatriate intellectual neither deserves nor gets uncritical reverence. Perhaps it’s salutary to find that what you fondly believe to be finely honed theoretical razorsharpness and beautiful prose comes across in the vernacular as less convincing than a used-car sales pitch.

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It is also unsettling to find that nationality is suddenly meaningful in ways over which there is no personal control: I have a deeply ingrained tendency to equate high culture with British TV, and low art with American TV…. The spectrum of respectable Britishness runs from Yes Minister…via The Bill to the neverending Dennis Potter Festival on the ABC. Americanness, in an exact reversal of terms, is associated with ‘hokeyness’…. Think of The A Team, Wonder Woman, Charlie’s Angels, Dallas and Dynasty. (Martin, 1991) Judging by this, it seems that the Australian critic Adrian Martin actually likes Aaron Spelling TV more than American TV as such, though that’s not the point. Nor is it the point to ask a question of Australian culture along the lines of ‘Do you prefer American imperialism or English colonialism?’, although Martin does come perilously close to an answer: ‘One does not have to love America to value, in a distant land, the gift of its popular culture.’ The real point is not that one kind of cultural subjugation is better than another, but that, for Martin, the American kind is not subjugation; it leaves you alone, while the British variety does not. ‘Britishness’ has the same status for Martin as the academy does in American sitcoms, and for the same reason; it is equated with finger-wagging pomposity and patrician arrogance, a combination that only the collision of quality and class could have produced. Presumably, for other critics and consumers, ‘Britishness’ doesn’t mean colonialism but something more agreeable. However, this TV Britishness is more than personal prejudice; it’s also institutionalized at the level of national cultural policy in the form of the pervasive polarity between quality and trash. Simply, and in the teeth of the evidence, ‘British’ means quality (and the ABC), and ‘American’ means the other thing (and commercial TV). There are of course plenty of English people, or people who do ‘British’ cultural studies, who have no more time for this cultural binarism than does Martin or any Australian. And of course not everyone from Britain is English. But such personal nuances don’t show in the international trade in national stereotypes. The social effect of ‘Britishness’ in Australia is not dependent on any English person; it’s a discursive organizer in an institutional system. Californication However, this lesson is not merely a cautionary tale; it’s also a suggestion. Expatriation does not have to be seen merely as a personal experience any more than national identity does; it is proposed here as a social relation, a discursive organizer. Expatriation may be risky, but it’s still necessary to travel, and there are things to be learnt by both the flying doctor and the culture under observation. It is well known, for instance, that Raymond Williams’s concept of flow came from his experience of watching

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US TV. More interesting in some ways is Williams’s cultural journalism, where he crosses the great divide between his ‘home’ territory of formal higher learning into the public domain, via the medium of a regular TV column for The Listener, a middle-brow weekly published by the BBC. In June 1973 Williams was writing about Californian TV. Near the end of his piece he has this: It wears you down. It’s like the predominant style in commercials, which trill and suggest and look winsome or irritable in ways we all know, but which often have an extra line, after what one expects to be the climax, such as ‘That’s quite right, I’ll try some,’ or ‘Good idea!’ I can only repeat my astonishment at the distance between all this and the people one meets…. I doubt if it’s the future, but if it is, there among the jets and the military electronics there is an extraordinary, almost tactile privatisation. Under the constant external assault, so much quiet intelligence, so much sensitive gentleness; also, by the evidence of results, so much isolated despair. Hardly any of this finds a public voice. (1989:28) It’s not often you hear about the privacy, quiet intelligence, sensitivity, gentleness and despair of Californians, at least in public, and here Williams is making his expatriation work not just at the level of sensorial perceptions but at the level of what I’d like to call useful astonishment.16 He’s pointing to something you can only discover by migration, and that’s the disjunction between public imaginings and private actions, between the media and their supposed social effects, between a producer-culture and its cultural products. Californians are one thing, but the TV-led Californication of the world is decidedly another.17 Shake spear Mind you, the Californication of the world comes in surprising forms too. Another expatriate, this one an American by the name of King O’Malley, sailed from San Francisco to Australia and ended up as the federal Minister for Home Affairs. What cultural baggage did he bring with him, as he oversaw the choice of an American, Walter Burley Griffin, as the designer of the proposed Australian capital, as yet unnamed, thirteen years after the federal Commonwealth of Australia had come into existence? There is a clue, and it suggests that what he sought for Australia was global cultural respectability. Here’s a report from The Great Jubilee Book of 1951, issued to mark fifty years of federation: For weeks before the ceremony the newspapers guessed at the name of the capital. They pumped ministers and public servants—but all to no

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purpose. As it happens hundreds of suggestions had been received. One, solemnly advocated, was ‘Sydmeladperbrisho,’ another was ‘Myola,’ while O’Malley did his best to convince the ministry to agree to ‘Shakespeare.’ But on the day all the intense speculation was brought to an end…. Lady Denman, the Governor General’s wife, mounted the dais, cast a contemplative glance around, opened a golden card-case, then spoke clearly. ‘I name the capital of Australia, Canberra,’ she said. And with heavy emphasis, laid the accent on the first syllable. Everybody cheered. (Feldmann, 1951) My sources do not record whether the name Shakespeare was rejected because it sounded a bit too close to an Aboriginal land-rights claim, but it is clear that the expatriate O’Malley, for whom Shakespeare was as foreign as the Aboriginal name Canberra, was trying to pull out of that golden card-case a treasure which was recognizable internationally, even if it had no resonance at all in the site he intended it to name. Natives and aliens And why should Lady Denman have received such universal applause for heavily accenting the first syllable of Canberra? Why, because that’s ‘native’ English pronunciation: As to their citizenship in the language, words may be classed as Naturals, Denizens, Aliens and Casuals. Naturals include all native words like father. Aliens are names of foreign objects or titles, which we require often to use, and for which we have no native equivalents, as shah, geyser, targum, backsheesh, sepoy. While words from barbarous languages are readily and quickly naturalized, words from French and the learned languages, especially Latin, which are assumed to be known to all the polite, are often kept in the position of denizens for centuries.18 And that’s Sir James Murray, introducing the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, an institution of the English language so revered that quite a few castaways choose it above all other books to take to their fantasy Desert Island. The OED is faced with a task few others have to face in quite such stark terms; as a dictionary of the English language it falls to the OED to determine those words ‘whose “Anglicity” is unquestioned’, and to distinguish them from the foreigners: ‘if we are to distinguish these classes at all, a line must be drawn somewhere’. In other words, the OED, a fundamental institution of the English language, is itself resting on a discursive concept of citizenship19 for that language, and it is also self-consciously a national institution, comparable

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with others like the BBC, Shakespeare, The Royal Albert Hall20 and statues of Queen Victoria. There are many other institutions of the English language, which do not claim status as national institutions, but which nevertheless export Englishness to the rest of the world. Notable among these are publishers, including Routledge, the publisher of this journal, whose story, from Algernon Methuen and The Wind in the Willows to the Arden Shakespeare and the International Thomson Organization, has yet to be told. Indeed, if popular culture can be said to be dispersed in a process of global Californication, then no less should intellectual culture be seen as the product of the Routledgification of the world—at least the world of cultural studies. Between them, such institutions of the English language pervade Englishness globally by discursive means, and thereby provide a clue as to what happens to the English whom Doris Lessing pursued, after they ‘vanish into camouflage’. Disappear they might, yet, as she says—‘they are certainly all around us. The press, national institutions, the very flavour of the air we breathe indicate their continued and powerful existence’ (1960/ 68:9). In short, the English turn into texts, in which form Englishness is exported, to take root as a ‘native’ in destinations like Canberra. And the English remain, self-effacing at home, self-aggrandizing abroad, as ever, but now not as people, colonial patriarchs or otherwise; now they’re institutions, corporations, commercially exchanged commodities which are also symbols of national and personal identity. The OED is internally preoccupied with origins—the historical beginnings and transformations of words—but it is significant culturally in its destinations; what it’s used for, and what it’s up against. As an institution of the English language it’s in competition with other global national symbols, and as a hegemonic leader of authoritative English it’s in competition with all the other institutional sources of that language’s discursive productivity. In one of its destinations at least it is quite happy to change nationality: The Australian National Dictionary (Ransom and Hughes, 1988)21 is one of its offshoots. Of course the OED is a conservative force, but it competes with Routledgification, it’s in the same market as the Californicators, and it is available even to them as a signifier of cultural authority; you’ll see its familiar blue, red and green stripes lending tone to many a semiotic bid for respectability, from the set of Clive Robertson’s World Tonight to Bob Hawke’s 1989 election TV advertisements, where his head appeared between a photo portrait and the Shorter OED, framing Prime Ministership visually somewhere between family and truth. You may also have seen those stripes on Neil Kinnock’s tie during the 1987 British general election, on biscuit tins and on a Melbourne tram.22

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In pursuit of the endless Contemporary culture is the physical fabric of localities together with the equally material global symbol industry, it’s personal identity and national imagery, where the critic, who is also the citizen, lives an ‘expatriated’ private life that may be far removed from public imaginings, and where national identity is an export commodity, exchanged on the world markets of the great discursive institutions; language, media, drama, journalism. In such a world, cultural studies needs uncertainty and migration, beyond its historic emphases on production, origin and identity, towards consumption, destination and exchange. The intellectual expatriate, with a map-book supplied by the very same international institutions of language that are also the objects of study, moves constantly between Ramsgation and Californication, Pleasurama and Dreamland, location and nation, global integration and local dispersal. One useful tool that can be carried to and fro on these moves in pursuit of a popular culture that seems always just to have decamped and disappeared over the horizon, leaving no f orwarding address, is astonishment; an indispensable item in the baggage of cultural studies. Notes 1 This quotation is part of a wonderful anecdote about the pursuit of the ‘real’ working class, which always turned out to be elsewhere and other: in Africa Lessing was told it wasn’t the Africans among whom she lived for twenty-five years; then in England she was told it wasn’t any of the people she actually encountered—neither manual workers, nor Communists, nor miners, nor people living in a New Town housing estate. Indeed, she was eventually told, if she really wanted to understand the authentic working class, she should take a trip to Africa… (12–13). 2 The irony is that Allen Lane’s King Penguin imprint is used here to deny the existence of the very culture to which the series is dedicated. 3 I’ve never been there, relying, like everyone else, on news pictures for my political information; in this case a story about the ALP centenary, broadcast by multicultural SBS-TV, which showed Bob Hawke parading past the Shakespeare (the other channels opted for shots of him under the ‘Tree of Knowledge’, a eucalypt of great age and symbolism). 4 Burke used his notorious phrase in the Reflections on the Revolution in France, to which Paine’s Rights of Man (1791) was a direct ripost. The name ‘Swinish Multitude’ thence became something of an honorific term in the radical ‘pauper press’. See John Hartley (1992a: chapter 7), for a full discussion of the role of the Painite pauper press in the development of a political public. 5 The export of live sheep to the Middle East is an important component of Fremantle’s port activity. 6 Built in 1749 as a naval shelter and home to a herring fleet, Royal Harbour Ramsgate is now a marina for small pleasure craft, and home to the Sally Viking Line of cross-channel ferries.

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7 Fremantle Prison was closed in 1991; convict-built in the 1850s it was the biggest building in Fremantle, and the oldest in Australia still being used for its original purpose. It is now a heritage development, and many of the erstwhile warders have been re-employed as tourist guides (while many of the visitors are former prisoners (1992b)). See Hughes (1987:573–80). 8 See John Hartley (1992: chapter 12), for an account of this process in Fremantle during the America’s Cup (1986–7), when the city was literally rebuilt as a set for the sporting/media drama. 9 Desert Island Discs is currently hosted by former TV newsreader Sue Lawley. 10 A more traditional semiotic reading of the Australian pub has been undertaken by John Fiske, Bob Hodge and Graeme Turner (1987: chapter 1). 11 Qantas is an acronym for Queensland And Northern Territory Aerial Services. One of its current fleet of long-haul 747s, on the Heathrow run, is called Longreach. 12 The well-known White Cliffs of Dover peter out in Ramsgate. Their most prominent section belongs to the National Trust, is an officially ‘Designated Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty’, and is called the Shakespeare Cliff. None of this applies to the off-white cliffs of Ramsgate which were, however, the landing-place of the Romans, the Saxons (Hengist), and Christianity (St Augustine), not to mention a Viking longship which made the journey in 1949 and is still there, an icon to expatriate destination and manifest ethnic destiny, set in concrete above the ruins of the Hoverport at Cliffsend, where the cliffs end. 13 ‘That culture, the loss of which he [the bourgeois] laments, is, for the enormous majority, a mere training to act as a machine.’ Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (1848/1964:86). 14 Thanks to Graeme Turner (1990). 15 From Alexander Somerville (under the pseudonym of ‘One Who Has Whistled at the Plough’) (1848) The Autobiography of a Working Man), quoted in Jennings (1987:235–6). 16 This term is an echo, distant and quite possibly discordant, of Tony Bennett’s notion of ‘Useful culture’ (in this issue; see also Tom O’Regan’s article herein). There is of course more than one way to be useful, and more than one kind of cultural policy. So the concept of useful astonishment is my contribution to the current ‘cultural-policy debate’. 17 Williams ends his piece with the valedictory remark of an ‘intelligent Californian’: ‘“Don’t let them californicate the world”’ (1989:29). 18 The ‘General Explanations’ to the OED (1st edn). 19 Given its historical period (1884–1928), it is not surprising to find that the OED is suf fused with concepts of linguistic citizenship which are also racial, including the racist philological wisdom of the time, i.e., that English was an ‘Aryan’ language whose ancestry was ‘Teutonic’ and ‘Nordic’. Upon this (spurious) foundation was also built the traditional canon of English Literature, so that for a couple of generations ‘English’ meant pre-literate songs and sagas from Norway, Denmark, Iceland, Sweden and Germany, but not the written literature of the ‘Latin’ or ‘Romance’ languages. Hence: ‘In this Dictionary, words originally native are traced to their earliest known English, and, when possible, to their earliest Teutonic form…; those of foreign origin…especially the French…are considered only with a view to the clearer comprehension of the history and use of the word in English. To trace the remoter history of these words, and determine their Aryan or other

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‘roots’, is no part of their English history.’ [From the ‘General Explanations’ to the OED]. 20 The Albert Hall was erected ‘FOR THE IMPROVEMENT OF THE ARTS, SCIENCES, AND INDUSTRIES OF ALL NATIONS,’ according to the bas-relief frieze that goes all the way round the building; Englishness as internationalism in the tradition of two other High Victorian piles; Paxton’s Crystal Palace for the Great Exhibition, and Pugin’s ‘Mother of Parliaments’ at the Palace of Westminster. 21 The indif ference of lexicography—and English itself—to nationality is indicated by the fact that the Australian National Dictionary’s two principal editors are from New Zealand and England respectively. 22 The role played by the OED in English English has traditionally been played by Webster’s Dictionary for American English. But there are international exchanges even across the Atlantic, emblematized perhaps by the spectacle of black American street youths performing live to the editors of the New Edition of the OED (1989) in order to ascertain the form and meaning of new entries like ‘break dancing’ and ‘body popping’.

References Ang, Ien (1991) Desperately Seeking the Audience, London and New York: Routledge. Brunsdon, Charlotte (1990) ‘Television: aesthetics and audiences’, in Mellencamp, Patricia, editor, Logics of Television: Essays in Cultural Criticism, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 59–72. Carrington, Noel (1945) Popular English Art [cover]; Popular Art in Britain [title page], illus. Clarke Hutton, London and New York: Penguin. Collins, Jim (1989) Uncommon Cultures: Popular Culture and Post-Modernism, New York and London: Routledge. Feldmann, Jules (1951) The Great Jubilee Book: The Story of the Australian Nation in Pictures, Melbourne: Colorgravure Publications (The Herald and Weekly Times.) Fiske, John, Hodge, Bob and Turner, Graeme (1987) Myths of Oz, Sydney: Allen & Unwin. Hartley, John (1991) ‘Popular reality: a (hair) brush with cultural studies’, Continuum: The Australian Journal of Media and Culture, 4(2), 5–18. ——(1992a) The Politics of Pictures: The Creation of the Public in the Age of Popular Media, London and New York: Routledge. ——(1992b) Tele-ology: Studies in Television, London and New York: Routledge. Hughes, Robert (1987) The Fatal Shore: A History of the Transportation of Convicts to Australia 1787–1868, London: Pan/Collins. Jennings, Humphrey (1987) Pandaemonium, London: Picador. Lessing, Doris (1960/68) In Pursuit of the English: A Documentary, London: Sphere Books. Martin, Adrian (1991) ‘Time tunnel’, in Corrigan, Denise and Watson, David, editors, TV Times: 35 Years of Watching Television in Australia, Sydney: Museum of Contemporary Art, 24–7. Marx, Karl and Engels, Friedrich (1848/1964) The Communist Manifesto, New York: Washington Square Press.

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Miller, Toby (1991) ‘Splitting the citizen’, Continuum: The Australian Journal of Media and Culture, 4(2), 193–205. Moorehead, Alan (1966) The Fatal Impact: An Account of the Invasion of the South Pacific 1767–1840, [republished 1987 with additional material by Ann Moyal] London and Melbourne: Hamish Hamilton. Morris, Meaghan (1988a) ‘At Henry Parkes Motel’, Cultural Studies, 2(1), 1–47. ——(1988b) The Pirate’s Fiancée, London: Verso. O’Regan, Tom (1986) ‘A fine cultural romance: aspects of Australian film in the late 1970s’, Australian Journal of Cultural Studies, 4(1), 55–75. Plomley, Roy, with Drescher, Derek (1984) Desert Island Lists, London, Melbourne, Auckland, Johannesburg: Hutchinson. Ransom, W.S. and Hughes, Joan M., editors, (1988) The Australian National Dictionary: A Dictionary of Australianisms on Historical Principles, Melbourne: Oxford University Press. Turner, Graeme (1990) British Cultural Studies, New York and London: Unwin Hyman. Williams, Raymond (1989) Raymond Williams on Television, O’Connor, Alan editor, London and New York: Routledge. Young Australia, 36th Annual (c. 1928). London: The Pilgrim Press.

KITES

MEAGHAN MORRIS

AFTERTHOUGHTS ON ‘AUSTRALIANISM’

At the ‘Dismantle Fremantle’ conference I found myself placed oddly—I thought—on a panel called ‘Australianisms’. Never having heard this word before, I was not sure what it meant. When speakers of English in Australia use an ‘Americanism’ or a ‘Gallicism’, we borrow from a foreign idiom and mix it with local speech. Presumably, speakers of any of the varieties of English in New Guinea or Fiji or England can use an ‘Australianism’ in that sense. But what could it mean for me—a white Australian with no familial or ethnic memories of a history in any other place—to talk metaphorically, in this alienating way, about ‘Australianism’ in Australia? Was I being asked to reproduce the ethnographic style of social critics in the 1950s and 1960s, who had to prove that Australians ‘had’ culture? Or was I being asked to reflect on the radical nationalist tradition deriving from the 1890s, with its passion for what John Docker (1991) calls ‘impossible stories of uniqueness’? Any ‘[nationality]-ism’ is a travelling form that may acculturate in some destinations (becoming lexicalized, thus losing its mark of origin), keep on circulating in a homely way as ‘foreign’, or else lose currency in others once its value is used up. So, thinking of an international flow of trade in national and regional meanings, I decided that ‘Australianism’ must refer to the commodifying process of identity promotion whereby the old folklores of white Australia, like the contemporary arts of black Australia, can gain new social and economic currency in the export (rather than ‘import’) industries of tourism and culture—in f ilm, television, music, advertising, the visual and performing arts. In other words, I interpreted ‘Australianism’ as a synonym for ‘Australiana’—a term historically rich with that vague embarrassment about location with which high culture responds to ‘kitsch’. I did not see why a cultural studies conference in Fremantle—admittedly, a city in Australia’s most secessionary state, and to me an exotic and in some ways foreign place—should reify its context in this way. So I chose as my topic one of the most solemn, classic, grand (therefore comic), politically fraught and emotionally complex themes in the repertoire of Australian studies, ‘Mateship’. Now usually construed as the major legitimizing myth of white male homosociality, mateship (loyalty, solidarity) is also an ethic without reference to which it can be hard to grasp—from any perspective of class,

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race, ethnic or sexual analysis—the nexus of culture and politics in contemporary Australia.1 Mateship is practised from Fremantle to Sydney, by no means only by white males. In Australian society, Tony Bennett’s ‘cultural technicians’ could not operate effectively without at least some consciousness of the protocols and passions of mateship. Since mateship is an everyday medium of micropolitical pressure—facilitating, for example, the kind of ‘industrial relationship’ between police and news media that Steve Mickler has analyzed —it also thrives in those oppositional milieux (feminist, antiracist, multiculturalist, gay and lesbian activist) which most often affect to despise it for its historic exclusionary determinants and its current complicities with power. Mateship entails forms of conduct which may figure in other ethical codes as unjust or even corrupt. Mateship shapes social personalities (rather than ‘selves’) which are as ruthless as they are sentimental. My father hated mateship. My cultural access to it as an emotionally positive value comes entirely from my mother. In putting mateship on a cultural studies agenda, then, and in ‘dismantling’ its connection to an exclusionary masculine national rhetoric, I thought to contest the reifying category ‘Australianism’. Only when I read John Hartley’s essay on ‘Expatriation’ did I learn that ‘Australianism’ is not, in fact, a variant of ‘Australiana’, but just an ordinary lexical item meaning ‘a word or phrase originating in or peculiar to Australia’ (the Australian Macquarie Dictionary says)—and that there is actually an Oxford Australian National Dictionary of such items. Some day, I must see what it says about ‘mateship’—a word which is, I now realize, exactly an Australianism. For the moment, I am more concerned with some afterthoughts that follow from discovering that I had unknowingly performed, at the conference, my allotted Australianist task. Hartley’s model of cultural studies as expatriation immediately becomes productively troubling for me. Does not my incapacity to see my own Australianism from even so proximate an outside as that provided by ‘English’ English suggest that there is, after all, an important sense in which we are not all expatriates or migrants? There are historical depths and geopolitical twists to what Hartley so aptly calls ‘the power of deixis’ in Australia. I doubt that the Cambodian refugee and the English academic really do ever share the same boat, although it is true, in the longer perspective that his text adopts, that their children or grandchildren may. But my main problem with expatriation as a ‘norm’ for non-Aboriginal Australians finds its source in this same longer perspective. If the original class distinctions transported from Britain to New South Wales were tenuous ones between officers, soldiers and convicts (prisoners of distance, all), the primal colonial class distinction was drawn between free expatriates from Britain and Ireland (colloquially known as ‘sterling’), and the native-born children of the soldiers and convicts—semantically devalued as ‘currency’.

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This history of distinction still lingers, shaping complex tensions between those born and not-born here that can snap between generations and stretch to touch the many cultures of Australia that have never ref erred to Britain or Ireland as there. We cannot seriously explore these tensions once we posit that we are all migrants. I would feel bogus saying that, or in claiming expatriate status; I have no experience of real emigration, and my links to my expatriated Welsh and Irish ancestors are little more than genetic. My most significant and motivating ‘there’ destinations are internal to Australia, and thus exert, in an everyday way, an other than ‘national’ attraction. Nothing here seems ‘upside down’ to me, and if the landmarks are sometimes perplexing it is not because they are new or strange, but because of an all too familiar difference between what I know of those landmarks and what my training prompts me to say. So even as I accept John Hartley’s metaphor of cultural studies as a displacement from existing homelands of knowledge, I think that this metaphor, if overextended, can act as a barrier or a trap. For example, it has been important in recent years for non-Aboriginal Australians to stress the recency of our arrival, the shallowness of our stake in the land; what is the difference between ten and two hundred years in Australia, we can say, when set against 40,000 years, 60,000 years, or forever? There are many reasons to suspend, with this question, the differences and conflicts dividing the non-Aboriginal mass of the population: the constitutional persistence of the assumption of terra nullius and an ongoing failure to negotiate a treaty, the radical exclusion of Aboriginal people from the most basic rights and opportunities assumed by the social contract, and continuing vicious racism despite the reshaping of Australian culture by Aboriginal pedagogy over the past twenty years. Yet even here, where the model of expatriation is so obviously helpful, it can be an obstacle once we ask ‘why’, ‘where’ and ‘how’ questions about that continuing racism. Peter Sutton (1992) has suggested that one source of indifference to Aboriginal people among Eastern white suburban Australians —that large majority, still, who may say that they have ‘never met an Aborigine’—can be traced to our own history of assimilation and amnesia, of growing up post-war without a sense of ancestry or tradition, or any cultural means with which to miss such things. Faced with immemoriality, we are sceptical. We have learned to be polite about it (and to exploit the contribution that Aborigines make to the national image economy) but deep down—we suspect it’s a scam. We may be outraged by sporadic exposes of grossly racist behaviour (those wretched country towns, those brutal Redfern police) but, when faced with stories of tragic dispossession, we are puzzled and easily bored. We don’t like ‘clinging to the past’, and so we don’t always distinguish the rhetoric of Aboriginal ‘militants’ (who are, we like to imagine, more in touch with ‘white radicals’ than with ‘ordinary Aborigines’) from the claims of ‘ethnic lobby groups’ who extract ‘special privileges’, ‘at our expense’, from ‘the rest of the community’. In short, we have forgotten our

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own expatriation and—egalitarian as we are—we still expect that everyone else should too. There is a distinctiveness to the complacency of this position, which I think needs to be marked as incommensurable not only with a mythology of origins and authenticity, but with a Romance of travel and displacement as well. It is a position from which Australia is quite stolidly experienced as home. But it is also a position which comfortably depends on a sense of history which is not experienced as fractured or fragmented, but, in a positive and affirmative way, as patchy, partial, vague. I would not want to call this an ‘Australianist’ position, still less to claim it (though I know it well) as ‘mine’. On the contrary, it structures experience and behaviour in ways that I would like to see changed. Yet for this very reason, I am resistant to the erasure of what I will call ‘dominion’ or ‘white settler’ subjectivity from accounts of Australian culture. Settler subjectivity—primarily but not exclusively articulated in Australia by Anglo-Celtic people—is oddly placed by contemporary cultural studies. The old dominions (like Australia, Canada, New Zealand) mess up the maps, drawn in Britain and the United States, that determine what counts as ‘sterling’ in global intellectual exchange. To use an Australianism, dominion subjects are the ‘whingeing whites’ of international cultural studies.2 Dubiously postcolonial, prematurely postmodern, constitutively multicultural but still predominantly white, we oscillate historically between identities as colonizer and colonized. Economically, we are perhaps more aware of being (re)colonized now than at any time in the past, and yet this awareness—with its intimations of a hostile future context f or current forms of cultural activism —is becoming more difficult to communicate internationally as the old political empires disintegrate. So we are sometimes caustic Cassandras in Anglophone cultural studies: accustomed to being objects as well as subjects of experiment for global ‘restructuring’ programmes, always thinking (as Hartley so exactly points out) in terms of identity in exchange, we are practised and prescient readers of prevailing trends in international trade. We rarely expect to affect them. Moreover, as a function of our ambiguous role as ‘human hinges’ in past encounters between imperial and indigenous peoples, we have a history of representing the abject for histories narrated from both sides—in Australia, ‘the scum of the earth’, ‘convicts and Irish’ (Winston Churchill), ‘the poor white trash of Asia’. Americans and Europeans often also assume that we are abstracted, like a footnote, from their history, and devoid of any complicating specificity in intellectual and cultural history; ‘after all, what have you had here’, a travelling reader of Foucault once told me, ‘but two hundred years of enclosure?’ This exemption suits the amnesiac style of many dominion subjects, who accept and confirm it happily: if most white Australians are learning to recognize their role as invaders in Aboriginal history, and many are dreaming of a redefined part in an ‘Asian-Pacific’ history, f ew will

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register any awareness of our colonizing roles in Papua New Guinea, Nauru or Fiji. For in such awareness, dominion subjectivity would find itself installed, unequivocally, in a discomforting, perhaps unwanted position of fully responsible historical agency (not to mention, in a history of marginal concern to ‘international’ cultural studies). More familiar to critical bearers of white Australianism is the homely splitting of awareness that occurs in any encounter with intellectual voyagers in search of that ultimate blank space—their last frontier (usually American), their mystic destination (German), their final pre-Oedipal idyll (French)—on which to inscribe what European history always already knows.3 It is easy to wince at this. But, as I wince, I also wonder—watching another round of visitors setting off for the desert primed by their Foucault, their Kristeva, or, most commonly these days, their Chatwin—if our own expatriate ancestors went forth into the wilderness, just like that, brandishing their Darwin. From one place in my experience, I know there is a difference between these modes of reading and travel, and at the same time, from another, I know that there is not. Somewhere in between, I always feel that sense of astonishment—one which I do share, after all, with John Hartley—which motivates my own pursuit of various ‘mixed-up’ (rather than mystic) destinations in the written spaces of Australian cultural history. In a Romantic mood myself, I would then like to make this word ‘Australianism’ refer to a multilingual habit of reading and a polyphonic way of hearing, rather than to a singular type of speech or an impossible story of uniqueness. Interpreted in this way, Australianism would be an active practice of reception (emphasizing destination), not a code of production (origin). But a material problem for intellectuals is, unfortunately, elided here. Such reading and hearing is not always practised internationally, or reciprocally, and this in turn affects what writers and speakers of varieties of English in which others locate ‘[nationality]-isms’ are likely to be able to (be heard to) say. It is my experience that, say, Americans of any provenance who speak internationally about problems, and in terms, specific to the United States (Americanisms) are heard as responsibly engaging with their society, in ways that are expected to resonate elsewhere. A white Australian or AngloCanadian who does exactly the same thing is much more likely to be heard as excessively concerned with nation, rather than society (thus, in this excess, as nationalist),4 and, if using Australianisms or Canadianisms, will be expected to work to explain them. So the problem I have in mind is not, per se, the dilemma of translation, but, even more materially, the burden of negotiating in translation an uneven distribution of labour. At ‘Dismantle Fremantle’, it was possible to discuss mateship and expatriation at much the same level of intellectual investment and effort. Neither topic required special justification, or demanded the adoption of a significantly national rhetoric. I spoke about mateship as a feminist; as a seventh-generation Irish-Australian; as a ‘Sydney’ petty-

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bourgeois (i.e., as one expected to err towards cosmopolitanism rather than regionalism) visiting Western Australia; and as a ‘New South Wales Labor Party (Right-wing faction) sympathizer’. People unfamiliar with the cultural distinctions and historical debates subtending these positions could ask questions in the usual way. But in the shift from an Australian speech situation to an Anglo-American publication, this equivalence turns into hierarchy. It is not simply that there is a reversal in which ‘I’ find myself off ‘home ground’—discursively expatriated, as it were—in Cultural Studies, but rather that the topics no longer have a comparable significance. An imbalance is introduced: mateship is over-coded as an Australian issue, expatriation is not; mateship requires an extensive introduction, expatriation does not. This is why something more than a difference between speech and writing can intervene between an international cultural studies conference and an international cultural studies journal. I cannot simply ‘dismantle’ mateship in Cultural Studies, because I would first have to construct it as a crossculturally intelligible object, and I would then have to maintain it as an internationally useful and interesting object. To put it baldly, it would be much more difficult, much more work, to write about mateship for Cultural Studies than it is to criticize, as if from the sidelines, an ‘English’ expatriate discourse. Contemplating the former, I quail merely at the thought of the footnotes I would have to write (and, more poignantly, of all the internationally unread and unavailable Australian texts that I would wish to be able to take as ‘read’). Doing the latter, I can simply talk about displacement, without seriously displacing myself or my reader into the ‘wilds’ of Australian history, and I can talk about difference without confronting it in my text. Through this comparison, I can say what ‘Australianism’ means to me in the context of Cultural Studies. What is peculiar (as The Macquarie Dictionary puts it) to an Australian practice is not having to assume the labour of glossing visibly local words and phrases (‘Australiana’, ‘whingeing’, ‘mateship’)—a relatively simple task. It is more a matter of drawing out the cultural assumptions and the histories of usage investing all those unmarked travelling expressions (‘special privileges’, ‘currency’, ‘clinging to the past’) in which a local experience may, if I do not do this work, inaudibly be speaking. Why bother? (I might think in a lazy or insular mood); far easier and perhaps more intelligible to write another essay (with Australian examples) about Bakhtin (1981) on heteroglossia. At this point, it would be all too easy to translate the difference that develops in transit between ‘expatriation’ and ‘mateship’ into the sterling vs. currency opposition (or, in twentieth-century terms, ‘cultural imperialism’ vs. ‘the little Aussie battler’) with which I began. In this way, I would be using John Hartley’s essay as a means to claim for my discourse an edge of difference which it had, in practice, already declined to construct—an empty gesture of sectarianism which is only too familiar in contemporary cultural studies. I

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think it is more useful (and more honest) to work back from this moment of polemical reduction to the problem it pretends to solve. In this case, my problem is not with ‘Australianism’ (nor with the coexistence in one country of many different modes and models of historical subjectivity), but with two different institutional forms of internationalism. ‘Dismantle Fremantle’ was a conference at which people working on what Dipesh Chakrabarty calls ‘non-metropolitan histories’ could discuss differences, compare questions, and share sources in the formal expectation that others should follow them up. In this context, John Hartley’s pursuit of Englishness made helpful and stimulating Australian sense to me. So, too, did Siew Keng Chua’s work on how representation of ‘Asian’ women in Australian media narratives works to disavow the metropolitan status of exactly those countries in our region to which Australia is now peripheral— and thus doubly to deny subjectivity to Asian-Australian women. However I could also ‘hear’ new questions about Australia in papers on topics seemingly more distant from my concerns. For example, Dipesh Chakrabarty’s reflections on the ‘subject that speaks in the name of…any third-world, nonWestern history’ prompted me to wonder if I could name the speaking subject of my own historical reflection; ‘dominion or white settler subjectivity’ is no solution, but just an improvised index of the problem.5 After hearing Luke Gibbons, I could then ask why a subject speaking about Australia in any name other than that of Aboriginality or that of a real or fictive expatriation is, in fact, so likely to be categorized now (‘patriated’, perhaps) as ‘nationalist’. When this happens, perhaps we encounter not so much an imperialism as a massively empowered, but largely unconscious, parochialism. The irony of this experience is that those of us who find it productive to enjoy such estrangement are often charged, by conscious parochialists in Australia, with a glib or self-seeking ‘internationalism’. My heart is impure on both scores. I am an internationalist, working ‘locally’ in a country where nationalism is (as the recent resurgence of republicanism suggests) a still unfinished business; a ‘paradox’, as Sylvia Lawson once put it: Metropolis, the centre of language, of the dominant culture and its judgements, lies away in the great Elsewhere, but the tasks of living, communicating, teaching, acting-out and changing the culture must be carried on not Elsewhere but Here. To know enough of the metropolitan world, colonials must, in limited ways at least, move and think internationally; to resist it strongly enough for the colony to cease to be colonial and become its own place, they must become nationalists. (1983/7:ix) Lawson wrote this in the context of her study of journalistic culture in late nineteenth-century Australia—a place which was ‘colonial’ in the strictest

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sense. However in the ambiguous, mixed-up and turbulent conditions that Australians negotiate today, the form of the paradox persists in our relations with a multiplicity of metropolitan centres: a recent cartoon about Australian identity had the republican talking in dollars-and-yen (that is to say, in terms of ‘Pacific Rim’ exchange) while the monarchist talks in sterling (‘Europe’); both are economic internationalists, but only the former is a cultural nationalist. Consequently, the importance of working in an international space of ‘non-metropolitan’ exchange is that only from such a space is it possible to imagine a history which will not find its destination in, once again, this paradox—and the nationalist subjectivity it imposes. In Lawson’s terms, the internationalism of Cultural Studies is rather of a metropolitan order. I support and I appreciate (to use an Americanism) the project of Cultural Studies. It is not a journal which practises (as most British and American publishers regularly do) that subtle censorship of Australian language which makes it so arduous or even impossible to write serious cultural analysis, and so tempting to rest content with the conventions of theoretical commentary. It is also an Anglo-American journal which encourages cross-cultural comparative analysis. So if I am reluctant to undertake that extra labour of writing on mateship for Cultural Studies, it is not that I feel personally that such efforts are somehow ‘wasted’; on the contrary, I have always learned most about Australia by writing from here to an elsewhere and from somewhere else to here. The problem is as usual, economic—a matter of imbalance and of one-way circulation. Because of its cost (subscriptions in sterling) and its method of distribution, Cultural Studies is a journal that few Australians will ever read. So in practice, these remarks are not really destined for Australians. Nor are the written proceedings of the ‘Dismantle Fremantle’ conference. Expatriation, in this context, therefore seemed to be the only logical choice. Notes 1 A classic feminist critique of mateship is Marilyn Lake’s (1986). 2 To ‘whinge’ (a word of Scottish origin) means ‘to whine’. 3 Examples of these national genres are, respectively, John Greenway’s travel memoir, The Last Frontier (1973), Werner Herzog’s film Where the Green Ants Dream, and Jean Baudrillard’s Cool Memories (1990). Bruce Chatwin’s The Songlines (1987) is an exquisite synthesis of all three. 4 Australians can, of course, hear other Australians in just this way. Thus a lecture of mine on Henri Lefebvre (articulated, it is true, to the policy debate raised in this issue by Tony Bennett) was described as a ‘sometimes strident’ affirmation of Australian intellectual traditions (Australian Cultural Studies Association Newsletter, 1(1), 1990). 5 On the problems of ‘locating’ Australia, see Ross Gibson (1992).

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References Bakhtin, M.M. (1981) The Dialogic Imagination, Holquist, Michael, editor, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press. Baudrillard, Jean (1990) Cool Memories, London: Verso. Chatwin, Bruce (1987) The Songlines, London: Jonathan Cape. Docker, John (1991) The Nervous Nineties: Australian Cultural Life in the 1890s, Melbourne: Oxford University Press. Gibson, Ross (1992) South of the West: Postcolonialism and the Narrative Construction of Australia, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Greenway, John (1973) The Last Frontier, New York. Lake, Marilyn (1986) ‘The politics of respectability: identifying the masculinist context’, Historical Studies, 22(86), 116–31. Reprinted in Whitlock, Gillian and Carter, David, editors, (1992) Images of Australia, Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 156–65. Lawson, Sylvia (1983/7) The Archibald Paradox: A Strange Case of Authorship, Ringwood: Penguin Books. Sutton, Peter (1992) Artists Week Panel on ‘Nation and Representation’, Adelaide Festival of Arts, March 1992.

KUAN-HSING CHEN

VOICES FROM THE OUTSIDE: TOWARDS A NEW INTERNATIONALIST LOCALISM1

I begin by signalling my departure from Eurocentric and Anglocentric cultural studies, which needs to change gear and slow down. But it would be foolish for me to give up cultural studies entirely. This critique is thus offered from within and without; strongly motivated to win friends and alliances, among ‘those friends with whom, out of a different loyalty, I must now openly disagree’ (Sivanandan, 1990). I want eventually to propose a ‘new’ internationalist localism in cultural studies; a strategic manoeuvring. The speedy dissemination of cultural studies in several parts of the white, academic world (mainly in Great Britain, the USA, Canada and Australia) in the past ten years or so, demands careful analysis and explanation. If one still believes in origins,2 then the current ‘cultural studies’ seems to have erased its historical traces and political forces (political in the sense of power relations operating at all levels of everyday life). Cutting across the humanities and social sciences, researchers doing interdisciplinary work began to label their field ‘cultural studies’. Beyond the endless efforts at networking, the crisis of Anglo-American social sciences and in particular the humanities might have contributed to the ‘emergence of cultural studies’ (Hall, 1990). That is, cultural studies came in at the right moment for those who, with more or less sensitivity to a new configuration of ‘the real’ and ‘the imaginary’, were concerned with ‘alternative’ modes of analysis of contemporary issues (largely corresponding to changing historical conditions), but who refused to accept bureaucratically regulated divisions of labour; it was a matter of legitimation. Cultural studies, as a floating sign, thus serves the function of interpellating segmented subjects and articulating discursive practices under its name. But the ef fectivity of its depoliticization has gone beyond the will of its ‘founding f athers’, which is good in the sense of leaving the father, but bad in its complicity with, and co-option by, the dominant academic institution. The danger of ‘internationalizing’ cultural studies lies not so much in its uncontrollable speed of acceleration but in the deep effects of its tendency towards depoliticization, as well as in an expansionist colonization. On one level, dwelling quite comfortably at university campuses, establishing its inner circles around commercial journals, cultural-studies’ academicism has

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not only betrayed its political claims, but also cut it off from contemporary social movements in the wider sense of the term. No doubt, cultural studies can occupy an institutional space and claim academia as a site for struggle through ‘winning over the young at heart under its wing’, so to speak, but at the same time it runs the risk of producing and reproducing leftist élitism. This in turn runs the risk of the horror of ‘a sort of Left cultural imperialism’, to use Sivanandan’s expression (1990:15). A conference organized around the attempt to ‘Dismantle Cultural Studies’ thus signals a complex set of sentiments. Is cultural studies something worth being dismantled? Out of an internal dissatisfaction, an unconscious arrogance or a self-reflexivity? Or out of a sense of external antagonism and hostility, of paranoia projecting back into the field of forces? From what location or position is the energy of dismantling coming? To be more precise, what’s wrong with the Anglocentrism of cultural studies? Has it ever claimed global universality in terms of theoretical scope and the research agenda? Isn’t it always culturally and geopolitically specific? Is cultural studies at a stage of exhaustion, thus having to expand its territories, in order to colonize the Other, so as to enrich itself? To tell you the truth, these questions no longer interest me. I have no obligation to think them through with my Anglo-or Euro-centric colleagues. To ask them to be ideologically correct (or ‘pc’) should be a task left for those who wish to occupy a space within the same academic world, a task which I have already given up. It is not so much that I have left the terrain of cultural studies for somewhere else, but precisely because the context within which I am attempting to appropriate cultural studies immediately confronts a different set of problems. These problems, of importing cultural studies into a personal context which is at the same time socio-political, are what I want to address here. Such a personal reflection may not connect directly to the enterprise of cultural studies, but it might be read as a chain of effects generated out of that space. But let me say this from the outset: I refuse in this instance to represent the third world, or a so-called Asian or even a Taiwanese perspective. The politics of representation always disguises local differences in various levels of abstraction. On the other hand, I do want to maintain a certain degree of my otherness; it is this, and its marginal position within and outside cultural studies, that might contribute to a productive dialogue between the centre and the margin, and perhaps—hopefully—to a modification of the shape of the dominant terrain. Yellow skin, white mask? I was among the first generation of students of Anglo-American cultural studies; rightly or wrongly trained in that bizarre critical ‘tradition’, and I returned to the third world with a quite naive political intent, partly inherited from the ‘fathers’ of cultural studies; ‘to change the world’. It is precisely this

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politics that eventually makes things problematic. Once you return from the marginality and discrimination of the Western academic world, you are suddenly no longer a minority; you come to hold a very much privileged (but none the less marginal) position in the social strata. Quickly you have to tune in to familiarize yourself with the rapidly changing local conditions, so as to locate yourself and find a position from which to engage in politics. The way that you do this is no longer ‘native’, no matter how hard you try to listen to the local voices. The systems of representation, as the Althusserians would put it, that you have internalized in the West (meaning the USA), clash with those of the local. On the other hand, you are not truly a foreign visitor operating on the basis of a tourist map. That would be easier. You are still marked by ineradicable traces of local culture; you are both inside and outside, in an ‘inbetweenness’ where problems begin. Anyone returning from the West (the US, Germany, Paris, London—in short, NATO) with the slightest critical sensitivity, inevitably faces the question whether the theory or research methodology they bring back with them is a component of, or reinforces, Western imperialism, even if the theory in question is Marxism, or feminism, or even the critical articulation of ‘postcolonial’ discourses. This is not a new question; ever since the beginning of the century, the issue of self-colonization has been posed again and again in Chinese intellectual history. As soon as one invokes a conceptual term (e.g., ideology), not to mention a system of categories, one runs the risk of being questioned by radical students and local activists as to whether these terms have any validity at all in ‘our’ context. Operating within a strong, twisted, contorted, nationalist sentiment, one has to be extremely careful in justifying the conceptual scheme put forward. Several strategies can be adopted to confront this situation. Ignoring it is the easiest one, but the most irresponsible and unconvincing. A second strategy begins with the argument that culture is not something enclosed; the vitality of a culture requires constant interplay with outside influence. One has to distinguish the discourse produced by the power bloc from the critical and radical discourses of the marginal in the West. A third strategy is to send the question back by asking: Do we have other choices? Indeed, the existing ‘Chinese’ or ‘Taiwanese’ mode of analysis simply cannot offer useful weapons for the combat. How does one analyze the working system of multinational capitalism and its effects in Taiwan without the aid of the Western neo-classical school of economics, or Marxist political economy? How does one account for the infiltration of ‘Western’ technology, displacing local labour forces, without any help from dependency theory or the theory of cultural imperialism? On another level, to counter Western imperialism, doesn’t one have to understand the internal mechanism exercised in the colonizer’s homeland? In short, Western forces act on the local social body in the form of objective social conditions, and the lack of local analytical tools to

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understand those forces necessitates calling for the help of Western theory and research.3 This may seem all too obvious as a justification that one can come up with; but no, it took me quite a while to figure it out, partly because the problematic in the Taiwanese context was framed into a nondiscriminating and totalizing dichotomy between East and West, or self and other; once trapped inside such an either/or logic, there is no way out. But in addition, it was partly because in Taiwan the state machine has orchestrated a widespread ‘modernization’ ideology which legitimates as ‘good’ or ‘advanced’ anything directly transplanted from the outside by the ‘techno-scholars’. This ‘modernization’ of course largely signifies Americanization, for complex political and historical reasons. A standard formula used by pro-state, pro-system intellectuals speaking for the powers-that-be is: ‘America has this (meaning it is superior) so we are justified in wanting to have it too.’ For example: ‘America has a blacklist preventing dissidents from entering the country, so there’s nothing wrong with “our” having one too.’ Once internalized into the cultural milieu as an ingrained common sense, it becomes extremely difficult to challenge, especially when you yourself are ushering in an ‘authority’ coming from more or less the same geographical location, albeit in a different direction. So what is the dif f erence between the techno-scholars of the state/ capitalist machines, and you guys claiming to be against the system? This type of question is always posed by our ‘radical’ students. In fact, justification is a forced effect of the encounter: ‘ben-tu-hua’ (‘localization’ or ‘nativization’) becomes the next item on the agenda. How does one localize Western discourse? Which sets of discourses are appropriate f or the local urgency? The production of strategic knowledge in the process of appropriating theory and research from the outside is at the core of concern. What Foucault calls ‘strategic’ knowledge is not merely academic rhetoric here. For instance, there are immediate implications for local social movements of the debate within the Western oppositional sector on (organic) intellectuals, and on the model of state vs. civil society, or people vs. power bloc, drawing on the works of Gramsci, Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe (1985), and StuartHall (1980). This is labelled locally as the struggle between theorists of civil society vs. those of the popular-democratic. Should the oppositional forces within ‘civil society’ target the Nationalist state and hence postpone or even suppress other struggles (e.g., sexual, ethnic and class discriminations)? Or should every ‘popular front’ maintain its own autonomy against the multiple complex of the ‘power bloc’, and even bypass the ‘statist’ entrapment? The debate can get very nasty. The ‘civil society faction’ charges the ‘popular democracy faction’ with helping the Nationalist state, because the effect of proposing a multiple front of struggles with egalitarian and democratic alliances among different lines of social movement is a fragmentation of oppositional forces. The ‘popular democracy faction’

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counterattacks by arguing that the state is no longer the single force holding power, that capitalist multinationals have penetrated local politics by backdoor methods (as well as through the front door by nominating state legislators who play money politics). The will to power is thus hiding behind the scenes, so why simply target the state rather than other sectors of the power bloc, such as the capitalist? The changing of the political regime does not guarantee popular democracy and may even reproduce the present capitalist-patriarchal-racial nexus of domination. Of course, I am simplifying the debate.4 But this summary suf f ices to demonstrate what I mean by localization and the formation of strategic knowledge. From the point of view of Western intellectual history there is no question of having to choose between Gramsci and Laclau/Mouffe/Hall, but in the change from the West to Taiwan, in the strategies of local struggle, it becomes a matter of either/or. This overt politics of appropriation in fact presupposes a social space within which intellectuals are situated. ‘Intellectuals’, who were previously designated ‘wen-ren’ or ‘literati’, have long occupied a privileged yet ambiguous position in Chinese social history. Ever since Confucius and the Warring States, literati have occupied a crucial socio-political position as the legitimate purveyors of strategic and ethical knowledge in the service of the empire and the emperor (Ho, 1964). This powerful intellectual force was institutionalized by the Tang civil-service examination into a bureaucratic apparatus mediating between the state and the people, determining and living off the relations between the two always and already at the expense of the people. What Bourdieu calls ‘cultural capital’ has been a material basis whereby literati constitute a ‘super class’. Even those literati who may be poor economically, and who for various reasons remain ‘outside’ the bureaucratic apparatus, retain a higher symbolic social status than unlettered commoners, by the very fact of being ‘lettered’. The connection between literati, merchants, business operators and lowlevel state bureaucrats (xiao-guan-liao), has traditionally formed the basis of a power bloc in all local contexts (Mann, 1987). It is this long-term complicity with the political and economic systems that gave literati their uniquely privileged status, a ‘tradition’ that continues, but not without new configurations. The forms of alliance are now different. On the one hand, intellectuals continue to ‘serve’ the state and business sectors. On the other hand, two new forms have emerged: one kind of intellectual speaks ‘for’ (in the sense of justifying), and the other ‘against’ the power bloc, but both forms are speaking from positions outside the organizational structure, and may therefore more easily win pure consent. However, the very fact of being able to speak in the public arena comes from the long tradition of ‘respect’ granted to literati, and there’s an expectation, seen even as a responsibility, that they will speak up in public ‘for the good of the empire/nation state’. In this sense, academic intellectuals are not as far removed from socio-political culture as are US academics, for instance. Their fields of struggle are directly connected

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with social spaces; taking the form of writing for newspaper columns, participating in public discussions, or being directly involved in social and political movements (this applies to ‘organic’ intellectuals, whether for or against the system, not to those who choose to remain ‘traditional’ or ‘ivory tower’ academics). This is where the possibility of our politics comes from; the combination of our conservative role-place as privileged intellectuals, partly because the power bloc now needs the apparently ‘just and neutral’ intellectuals to justify their political and economic ends. Some (including liberals, radical liberals, and old leftists), can pretty much enjoy this room for manoeuvre, or at least be able to occupy a space from which to be heard, to ‘speak’ for the masses’. For others, including myself (neo-or ‘post-leftists’), reminded by FoucauldianDeleuzian politics, the problem of how to occupy a space endorsed by conservative-élitist ideology (i.e., respect for the intellectuals), and then how to use this strategic position to make space ‘for people to speak for themselves’, becomes the central issue. But before objective conditions can be constructed for the oppressed to speak, oftentimes you are forced into a situation where you have to speak ‘for’ them, to defend the interests of minority groups. Thus, you always walk the line between ‘speaking for’ and opening up a space for others to speak. As a result, postleftists have more ‘burden’ (bao-fu) than other types of intellectuals, largely because of the ‘Western’ line of influence; while resisting identification with the traditional literati role, taking the position of the ‘unlettered’ would mean you would have to divest yourselves of the powers that you claim to be manoeuvring. Towards a New Internationalist Localism Cultural studies cannot resist internationalization. It is irresistible not because of its fashionable name but because there are things at stake. Its forceful analytical tools, its alternative account of the construction of reality, and its implicit commitment to the side of the marginal, have provided the weapon, the tactics and the spirit for intervention in different cultural contexts. The question becomes not so much whether it is imperialist or expansionist, but how to make use of this irresistible formation for progressive ends, to reclaim its political cutting edge. One thing lacking in the practices of cultural studies is to build up international alliances, not in the sense of constructing a universally valid and cross-culturally suitable analytical framework, but to propose an internationalist agenda, to use the existing site of academic connection to articulate international cultural politics. Pushing the strategic works of Hall, Laclau and Mouffe one step further to a different level of articulation, I am calling for ‘New Internationalist Localism’ in cultural studies.

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From the point of view of the geopolitical location within which I am situated, the necessity for an internationalist strategy is not an ideological position, since historical conditions themselves urge such a move. Given the fact that capital, patriarchy and racism have no nationality, it makes no sense to insist on the priority of nationalism or national identity.5 In circumstances where international political and economic power has formed a solid alliance with local power blocs, it makes no sense to struggle only on the level of the local. Given the fact that ideologically ‘censored’ information and cultural production have deeply permeated the politics of everyday life (from 7 Eleven and McDonald’s, CNN and IBM, to blue jeans and Madonna), it makes no sense to speak of forming a national culture, national identity and subjectivity, without accounting for these transnational forces flowing into/ through our (social) body. I am not suggesting that we should give up the local and only opt for the internationalist agenda; I’m urging the local struggle should always be conscious about, and possibly forming connections with, the international. Thus, it is changing historical conditions that demand a new internationalist localism. It is on both the international and local levels that a strategy based on the antagonism of people vs. power bloc has to be produced. ‘People’ here is not an empty term; it designates underprivileged social forces. In concrete practices, the strategy is to interpellate those groups who, through autonomous organizing and mobilizing modes of operation, attempt to release long-repressed social energies in the articulation of people’s power. Under the shadow of money politics the myth of electoral democracy cannot represent the will (much less the desire) of the people in nonpolitical arenas. The American version of bi-party electoral democracy has led to radical questions and challenges to it in the third world. As a result, popular democratic movements no longer identify with party-parliamentary politics. They assert that the reconstruction of popular subjectivity can only be achieved through struggles on multiple fronts in social movements; or, to use Laclau and Mouffe’s (1985) formulation, through ‘deepening’ the principles of radical liberalism’s pluralism. Social movements are constant and permanent struggles, which do not take the holding of the state apparatus or means of production as their ultimate goal. Wherever there is power, there is resistance. This ‘non-statist’ strategy can make use of the state without investing its entire fighting energy in the state; it does not oppose intervention in and occupation of specific strategic positions within the state as these can be made to act to the advantage of social movements. State apparatuses are distrusted not because they are by definition evil, but because of their structural positioning in the social map; and because reliance on the state might weaken the autonomy of social groups. In other words, the strategy is neither statism nor antistatist puritanism. Rather, it attempts to escape capture and conditioning by the state, and to break up the binarism of state vs. civil society.6 Thus, the alliance of the power bloc—within which the state is the

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central point of articulation—is the target for struggle for new social movements; any political party, when holding power, or in its capitalpatriarchy alliances, will have to face the challenge of these movements. A new internationalism has to build upon the formation of local subjectivity, without which an international alliance among local social movements is impossible. But equally the construction of that subjectivity has to recognize the influence of outside forces on different levels of social life. The shaping of local peoples’ cultural subjectivity can no longer go back and look for origin, purity, and authenticity; it must be connected to the here and now of everyday life. If cultural formation is always open ended and interactional, then it is no bad thing to encounter outside forces. In fact the vitality and creativity of culture can be constructed out of such encounters. In places like Taiwan and Hong Kong, situated in such a peculiar, twisted, historical and geographical conjuncture, the possibilities of new and lively culture are that much greater. The problem is how to face reactionary elements and how to deepen or cultivate the formation of cultural democracy. The popular democratic position is supportive of anti-imperialist and nationalist groups, seeing them as one line of the social cultural movement. But it must also remind nationalism of the danger of ethnocentrism, and that nationalism cannot be an overarching principle, attempting to become a dominating force by directing all other lines. The nationalist agenda within oppositional sectors in Taiwan—independence vs. unification—has produced antagonism which has in effect disrupted the possibility of solidarity against the power bloc. When such an agenda achieves ideological hegemony, when it asserts priority over issues of race, class, and gender, it becomes oppressive, denying the legitimacy of the struggles of those who don’t take national identity as their central concern. In effect, it postpones other forms of struggle and reduces liberating and adversarial energies. One has to learn from history; monolithic and singular articulations can no longer work. The new internationalist localism operates not on national but on a geographical and regional logic, and advocates alliances and interactional support among the people. Thus, the new internationalist localism by-passes party and centralizing leadership, opting for more horizontal rather than vertical alliances, and stressing democratic solidarity among subject groups. Thus, it is not Leninism (neither early nor late), but it advocates radical, plural, democratic principles, attempting to break national or any other forms of boundary; attempting to forge co-operation between marginal, minor, oppressed groups.7 The struggle between people and power bloc had no national boundary. Popular forces have to be connected in order effectively to combat the alliance between local and international political/economic power. The dialectic between localism and new internationalism is the appropriate strategy to confront these new times.

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An internationalist popular-democratic struggle against internationally allied power blocs is an agenda in which people doing cultural studies in all geographical contexts might be able to work. On the academic level, the production of academic discourse has to move out of the white closet, to connect with the yellow and black worlds. Without a new internationalist project, cultural studies will never leave the ghetto of x-centric land. Within each context, post-leftist intellectuals should be able to make use of the strategic/privileged positions they occupy to link up with local social movements, and to use their international connections to bring various types of local social movement together, depending on their own nature. A forum like the ‘Dismantle’ conference might well provide a beginning. ‘What is to be done’ next, to facilitate and accelerate the possibility for alliances, is perhaps the question that leaders and workers who have already occupied strategic positions in the field of cultural studies have to ask themselves. Notes 1 An early version of this paper was first presented to the ‘Dismantle Fremantle’ cultural-studies conference in June 1991.1 would like to thank Ien Ang and John Hartley for inviting me, and Meaghan Morris and Larry Grossberg for sharing their thoughts. I thank Naifei Ding—again—for reading every version of the manuscript, and friends in the War Machine group, Taiwan, for their support, which keeps my fighting spirit alive. To be honest I feel uncomfortable with this paper, in its present form; i.e., without concrete local analysis. The original version was in two parts—one on Taiwan’s social movement, one on the ‘dismantling’ which is retained here. Because of considerations of length, the paper had to be cut into two. For the first part, see Chen (forthcoming) ‘Against the state/media: “Wild Lily”, collective identity and social movement’. 2 Origins, not singular origin, since the current hegemonic construction of the British version of cultural studies as the origin is a fiction which doesn’t do justice to each local form of articulation of the various types of cultural studies; for instance, Australian cultural studies began almost at the same time (and thanks to Tony Bennett for pointing this out to me). 3 I’m not happy with the term ‘Western’ because of the danger of totalization, but before other terms can be produced to signify more precise meaning, I have no choice but to use it, especially in this context. 4 For a more extensive account of the debate see Kuan-Hsing Chen (1991). 5 The formation of the European Community does cast doubt on this issue. 6 The notion of ‘civil society’ is a problem in the case of Taiwan, which doesn’t have a civil society in the Western sense, but it does have its own forms of society. 7 An example is the international labour alliance between Japanese and Korean trade unions, which together were successful in a fight against the closure of the Japanese PICO company’s Korean factory in 1987.

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References Chen, Kuan-Hsing (1991) ‘Gramsci vs. Laclau/Hall: the Taiwan debate on “civil society” vs. “popular democratic struggle”.’ Unpublished manuscript [Chinese]. Hall, Stuart (1980) ‘Popular democracy vs. authoritarian populism: two ways of “taking democracy seriously”’, in Hunt, A., editor, Marxism and Democracy, London: Lawrence & Wishart, 157–85. ——(1990) ‘The emergence of cultural studies and the crisis in the humanities’, October. Ho, Pig-Fe (1964) The Ladder of Success in Imperial China: Aspects of Social Mobility 1368–1911, New York: Columbia University Press. Laclau, Ernesto and Mouffe, Chantal (1985) Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, London: Verso. Mann, Susan (1987) Local Merchants and the Chinese Bureaucracy 1750–1950, Stanford University Press. Robbocop (1991) editor, Taiwan’s ‘New’ Oppositional Movement: The Road to New Democracy—The Battle and Game of ‘The Marginal Subverting the Centre’, Taipei: Tang-shan: The War Machine Series [Chinese]. Sivanandan, A. (1990) Communities of Resistance, London: Verso. Yan, Shan-nong (1991) editor, A New Political Spectrum: From Civil Society to Popular Democracy, Taipei: Tang-shan: The War Machine Series [Chinese].

• REVIEWS •

BARRETT WATTEN

RADICAL POETICS

• Cary Nelson, Repression and Recovery: Modern American Poetry and the Politics of Cultural Memory, 1920–1945 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), 336pp., $24.95 Hbk, $14.95 Pbk. One of the central projects of literary criticism over the last decade has been to reread works that survived the institutional processes of canonization against the immediate and often more politically charged cultural matrix that produced them. What this canonization process has meant in the case of American modernism has been a wholesale suppression of the rich cultural diversity and polemical contestation that were essential to the period that produced modernism. In reviving discussion of the social matrix of modernism, exemplified by dozens of writers who have been dismissed and largely forgotten, Cary Nelson’s ground-breaking revisionist account, Repression and Recovery: Modern American Poetry and the Politics of Cultural Memory, 1920–1945, calls into question what we think we know about two aspects of American modernism that have until now been kept rigidly separated, its ‘aesthetic’ and ‘populist’ strands. Indeed, contrary to much received wisdom about the politically suspect transcendence of élitist, aesthetic cultural forms over mass-based, populist ones, and the concomitant subversive potential of ‘low’, popular-cultural forms when seen against the superior claims of ‘high’ ones, Nelson argues a continuity of emancipatory aims in both. Both should be read as having been produced in the same social context, and although their chosen forms and relations to content may seem so divergent as to be mutually unreadable, both developed in fact out of a mutually constituting dialogue. Both ‘autonomous’ and ‘oppositional’ strands were articulated in the production of simultaneously self-and socially-critical ‘subject positions’, even if these socially discursive subject positions may end up reinterpreted quite differently in literary and social history. The period of American modernism under discussion in Nelson’s book, then, the era ‘between two wars’, was a virtual laboratory of socially radical and aesthetically innovative forms whose ultimate horizons of meaning were open-ended and indeterminate while at the

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same time mutually articulating. Both made possible new kinds of selfknowledge and social action. That such a reasonable claim still must be argued against institutional resistance is apparent from Nelson’s methodology. Standard literary period histories are careful to segregate their materials into conventionally disjunct, canonical topics; Nelson counterproposes, as models for his approach, contemporary accounts of American modernism as it was being produced. Nelson cites Horace Gregory and Marya Zaturenska’s A History of Modern Poetry, for example, in which the range of authors under discussion is broader, the stakes of intellectual debate clearer, and the sense of an on-going dialogue less foreclosed than in any similar period history since World War II. Nelson follows these accounts in organizing his book as a continuous matrix of detail—in which literature is not elevated to the status of a received history but seen as often radically disjunct, contradictory, and still in explicit dialogue. His book proceeds without chapter subdivision and deliberately ignores a temporal chronology, maximizing the values of the contradictory aesthetic tendencies under discussion while not consigning them to their respective foregone conclusions. It is not Nelson’s moral, for example, that the defeated poetics of labor radicalism were simply superseded by the autonomous literary subject that would be romanticized in the post-war period. In presenting the work of poets as diverse as the proletarian poet H.H.Lewis and his admiring critic, William Carlos Williams, or popularizers like Vachel Lindsay with deliberate obsurantists like Abraham Lincoln Gillespie, or Harlem Renaissance poets like Countee Cullen and Langston Hughes with modernists such as e. e. cummings and Gertrude Stein, or popular front agitators like Sol Funaroff and with radical experimenters like Mina Loy and Elsa von Freitag-Loringhoven, Nelson intends no less than formally to re-present the excitement of literature in a period of emergent social form. Such a boundary-transgressive approach extends to Nelson’s reversal of the current historicist precedence of theoretical model over its chosen materials. Recent refigurings of literary history have tended to proceed by (1) selecting a canonical figure or work; (2) reading contradictions in the work through one of the available theoretical models; (3) identifying moments of ‘tension’ in the work that can only be explained by going outside the work to its context of production; and (4) reading the context suggested by this divergence as the site for a new understanding. Nelson’s method challenges the priorities of this approach; instead, he presents a fragmentary field of oppositional literature to be considered as matrix—simultaneously both text and context. As a result, a variety of theoretical models, rather than anchoring a contextual rereading of a unique work, are produced out of the matrix of literary materials Nelson presents; the plurality of these models is necessary due to the disjunction of literary contexts being brought together. Considering modernist poetry as a single ‘discursive formation’ that incorporates the various instances of its

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practice in a given period, then, is shown to be produced out of cultural diversity rather than out of Foucault or Laclau and Mouffe. The question of poetic agency—what poetry can do as both aesthetic and political—is central here. Many on the left, for instance, would grant the aesthetic no political agency (because restricted to a small cadre of likeminded practitioners, for one thing), while many committed to the aesthetic similarly would denigrate anything like social address in poetry. Such views, for Nelson, would fail by substituting an unobtainable end (Why can’t poetry make the revolution?’) for the process of coming into self-definition that is the basis of poetic agency. In this sense, poetry’s open-endedness, its indeterminacy, and thus its social plasticity are not its failures but its most important successes. So for Nelson, if in the most general sense poetry’s ‘capacity to establish convincing and politically effective judgments about a variety of other culture institutions; its changing power to relocate the discourses of politics, religion, justice, and both personal and national identity within itself are ‘sites of continual struggle and rearticulation’, then poetry has no immutable essence. These texts that often have irregular right margins can be anything that particular cultures want and need them to be. Any social function that language can serve—and this exceeds the functions that seem plausible for language in our own time —can be served by poetry in the right historical context. This social plasticity is grounded for Nelson not in immanent textual indeterminacy but, surprisingly, precisely in the particularity and social specificity of its material production. One of the central features of his account is its reading of texts not as simply representing their world but as objects circulating within the world: As I write now, I see scattered before me a few representative material fragments of poetry’s alternative social functions: a folded five-by-nineinch 1894 broadside of E. Fitzwilliam’s ‘People’s Party Campaign Songs’; a six-by-nine-inch 1900 broadside by Samuel M.Jones, the reform major of Toledo, Ohio, titled ‘Freedom Songs’…a 1911 broadside version of Lindsay’s poem ‘To the United States Senate,’ distributed to all members of congress to protest the senate’s validation of William Lorimer’s election. The material embodiment and particularity of poetry are thus the first place to look for evidence of social plasticity. It is therefore no accident that one of the major premises of Nelson’s account is its grounding of poetry in the conditions of its production by reading its explicit content hand in hand with the implicit aesthetics of the editions in which it first appeared—from workers’ movement broadsides to fine art collector’s edition. Full-color plates

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juxtapose covers from IWW song sheets for ‘Workers of the World Awaken!’ by Joe Hill with Louis Lozowick’s constructivist cover for Unrest: The Rebel Poet’s Anthology, and this presentation of the self-evident fact of populist/ modernist poetry’s material production exemplifies the first moment of poetic agency—as a material instance of culture. One question for Nelson to answer is how this poetic materialism adequately accounts for the social plasticity of its ultimate ends. His first approximation to a response is that, in and as material, poetry is a historically specific disjunction from normative contexts that provides a site for social comprehension. The autonomy of modern poetry, generally taken to be the Achilles heel of its politics, turns out to be formally produced by a wide range of poetries not canonically modernist, and this making of a site for social perspective becomes a sufficient condition for social engagement. ‘Poetry offered people oppositional language they could quote and identify with— socially critical perspectives of anger and idealization they could accept on their own.’ Such identifications could be as easily with content-specific anger as with form-specific alterity; it is the possibility of moving from perspective to engagement that counts. ‘At stake in the changes occurring in this period are the discourses privileged to negotiate political questions…Poetry in this time became one of the most dependable sources of knowledge about society and one’s place and choices within it.’ Poetry’s autonomous perspective, in short, is equally available through formal innovation or populist opposition. Conspicuously absent here is any notion of negativity based on a claim for social transcendence, an absence quite pointed given the number of related left critiques of culture that have seen the aesthetic as the virtual exemplum of false consciousness. Nelson has other uses for the negativity that has so often been used on the left to deny poetry more than symptomatic relevance: ‘A denial of poetry’s relation to politics and cultural struggle is thus itself a constitutive, structural definition of poetry; the denial in a sense establishes a version of the very relation it would deny, turning poetry into the fixed “other” of the political, the everyday, the contingent.’ The negativity of poetry thus just is a context-specific perspective, allowing it to enter into a dialogue with other social discursive formations. Nelson uses this explanation of aesthetic negativity to show how poetry with often explicitly reactionary intentions can be read in context as progressive, citing for example the inclusion of work by Frost, Eliot, and Pound in an Anthology of Revolutionary Poetry. Nelson comments: ‘It does not matter what intentions these poets may have had for their work. History has taken these poems up and given them new meanings.’ Ezra Pound himself may have seemed as much politically progressive as formally innovative when he presented some of his early Cantos in an edition whose illustrations conveyed an industrial dystopia looking more like Diego Rivera’s industrial murals than Pound’s medieval archaism. The point is that poetry itself has a historical agency greater than any author’s intent. So great was the need for social perspective, Nelson seems

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to imply, that a wide range of contradictory materials, as long as they were divergent from the contingent and quotidian, could offer it. Thus Nelson’s central point in crossing so many boundaries between kinds of poetry formerly held to be incompatible would seem to be that it is, beyond materiality and perspective, in poetry’s status as language that it best enters into the immediate political context. This is true both of poets writing what now may seem incipient Language Writing—an extreme example being that ‘revolutionist of the word’ Eugene Jolas’s ‘Mountain Words’: mira ool dara frim oasta grala drima os tristomeen —as much as of poets whose claim to poetry’s immediate realism is absolute, for example in Mike Quin, ‘perhaps the quintessential Communist party poet’: The long collection speech is done And now the felt hat goes From hand to hand its solemn way Along the restless rows. In order to see how the linguistic alterity offered by the first text can even exist in the same world as the social realism of the second, Nelson relies on a distinctive common denominator: neither of these poems is particularly ‘excellent’ as poetry, neither could they in the wildest stretch of the imagination be seen as canonical: both are more typical than exemplary. To exemplify the social context of literary production in them, then, Nelson proposes a reading of these works as fragments of what could be envisioned in retrospect as a transsubjective, collective project: If there are what seem powerful lines or phrases in poems that, on the basis of our current taste, seem to be generally weak, then the discursive formation of poetry offers these lines a way of functioning eff ectively. Part of what is exciting about this period…is thus exactly what the New Critical tradition has found so repellent here—the instability and sometimes obliteration of individual difference and the reduced importance of the formal integrity of individual poems. There are major stakes here, not only in reinventing American modernism but in questioning the priorities of historicist criticism. The threat that ‘minor literature’, which could only be read and understood in such a fragmentary and decentered way, poses to the great works has been used to support the preeminence of the canon: ‘The canon polices this epistemological threat,

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ensuring that if minor poetry actually becomes wholly “literary” it will cease to be “minor”.’ In order to read with the social production of meaning, then, minor literature must be taken as providing sites for social perspective that are, by their nature as language, intentional in a way that autonomous works are not. At least, autonomous intention really cannot of fer more for the social production of meaning than such linguistic sites; so the dissociation of ‘mira ool dara frim’, the displaced pathos of ‘Along the restless rows’, and the preposterousness of Eliot’s Sanskrit in The Waste Land would variously help construct and engage social discursive formations. I do not want to seem here to defend the autonomous, individual masterworks of the canon against the challenge of collective literary production. Still I would argue with Nelson that there is a difference in intention between works that can only be seen as paradigmatic sites for social perspective and those that seek intentionally to alter or reconstruct ‘discursive formations’, and that this difference must be taken into account. The work of Louis Zukofsky is a case in point. Zukofsky is one of the American modernists (Kenneth Rexroth, Charles Reznikoff, and Melvin Tolson are others), who attempted to reconcile the formal possibilities of ‘aesthetic’ and ‘populist’ materials, particularly in his epic poem ‘A’ with its early attempt to imitate a Marxist dialectic in its mode of construction. Even given its intentional due, Zukofsky’s strategy would seem to run the risk of collapsing back into the canonical paradigm, and the ‘minor’ materials Nelson argues for would, again, only support the ‘major’ work. But this reading is only possible if the objective of Zukofsky’s epic production is taken to be itself, rather than the complex reorientations of social intention and subject position Nelson describes as the effect of ‘minor’ work. In reality, Zukofsky’s poem provides both sites for social comprehension and a textual dynamic of their articulation that restates poetic agency on a level above simply identification. Readings of such complex individual efforts to synthesize historical contradictions, however, are minimized in Nelson’s account. Indeed, Zukofsky takes up less space in the book than does H.H. Lewis. The justification for this can be found in Nelson’s privileging, not of modernist co-optation of populist address, but of popular-front competition with modernist techniques. Social realism of the sort published in the ‘proletarian literature’ phase of the New Masses is thus read as not to be valued for its explicit content—which could only be validated in social revolution perhaps—but as the coinage of the negotiation of ‘subject positions’ with revolutionary roles. As a result, the poetry published in the New Masses’ later popular-front period attempted to mobilize a wide range of ‘fellow traveler’ subjects rather than a single, ‘revolutionary’ one. This led to some awkwardness when poems written in the earlier, more militant mode were sent in to the editors, only to be returned with thanks, but ‘we’re not publishing that kind of poetry now’. What resulted was an attempt to invest a wide range of poetic forms with social perspectives amenable to revolution.

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‘The Masses was taking the poetry of the genteel tradition’, the more conventional verse that would have been published in Poetry, for instance, ‘and trying to give it altogether different cultural significance.’ Significantly, too, Nelson concludes: ‘At least in a limited way, the genteel tradition thereby becomes modern.’ That this kind of formal reading of the content of radical poetry contradicts probably every critical perspective that developed in this period, pro or con (with the possible exception of William Carlos Williams’s polymorphous flirtation with the proletarian poets, which was later suppressed by his own canonizers), gives some value to Nelson’s use of ‘discursive formation’—the perspectives offered by such linguistic fragments can only be recuperated, later, after their inherent arguments have disappeared along with the contexts in which they were originally argued. For the advantage of seeing the creation of reflective social ‘subject positions’ as the outcome of a wide range of contradictory aesthetic options, there is still the defect in Nelson’s approach that specific stakes in the politics of the period—necessary to understand how these major or minor fragmented perspectives were created in the first place— are undervalued. Not much is said, for example, about the administration of meaning in the editorial policies of the New Masses, simply because the channeling of expression into the popular-front topic of the moment could only partly be said to have been implicated in power politics—in the articulation of subject positions into such a discursive formation as the ‘Communist Party’. To the extent that it was, to the extent that the subject positions created by the New Masses’ editors represented collective beliefs (beliefs then to be represented by the party) as opposed to other beliefs, Nelson’s account of poetry’s agency misses a major point. But Nelson’s discussion does add to the understanding of how heterogeneous subjects could be organized in an emerging Stalinist culture, and how the slippages in that organization in turn could create socially progressive possibilities that would go beyond the limits of explicit party doctrine or its counterpositions (for example, in a Trotskyist poetic agency in the politics surrounding surrealism). Nelson’s detailed account of American modernism thus appears to be organized, against any inherent aesthetic or political intentions in specific works, to prove an emergent ‘subjectivity effect’ made not only possible but necessary by poetry’s perspective on the cutting edge of a social movement. The ultimate effect, in other words, moves away from the specific embodiments of material culture, the naming of names and citation of examples that are so palpably the pleasure of Nelson’s text, toward a model of linguistic transsubjectivity produced in this period. Nelson’s move from ‘repression’ (of political context) to its ‘recovery’ would thus simultaneously invent the subject of American modernism in this archaeology of its fragments. An emergent culture is seen here as creating a diverse set of cultural touchstones that produces a ‘desiring space’, one that in turn produces the new subject. Out of the overlapping of aesthetic and populist

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strategies with conflicting claims to futurity—of the otherworldly work of art or the this-wordly revolution—comes a ‘singly’ utopian moment that led to a transcendent subject, as much the pride as the curse of the post-war period. If this is the implication of Nelson’s book, it is of major importance for our understanding of politics as much as for art. But it is a conclusion that, I would say, can only be made at the sacrifice of equally compelling aspects of aesthetic and political futurity. What are we to make, for instance, of the devaluing of affective identification for material incommensurability in political poetry—even if we would like the embarrassment of a poetics of political sentimentality to go away? How are we to account for the specific ways poetry, as any rhetorical form, coerces meaning and binds the subject into a compact that would limit his or her horizons of meaning as much as expand them? Do the positive claims to represent the here-and-now in modernist poetry simply collapse as perspectives into the deferral of meaning that poetic form itself conveys? Finally, at what cost are both political and aesthetic intention to be universalized as pointing to a subject of history— even if this subjectivity has been materially produced? And whose subjectivity will this turn out to be? On the other hand, if there is an emergent cultural form being described in this interchange between two modes of modernist subjectivity, it would imply an implicit radicalism in post-war literature—in the elevation of the romantic subject in the Black Mountain, New York, and other schools, as well as in the more normative identifications of confessional and ‘persona’ poetry—that would otherwise seem politically evasive. From a left perspective this is optimistic, and Nelson’s book supports such a notion of that social construction of meaning as a result of material embodiments rather than formal intentions. If such a ‘politics of the person’ has been the inheritance of the conflicts of the thirties, however, the real persons left out of its prototype have been minority writers. Nelson documents a considerable exchange between the Harlem Renaissance and contemporary political movements, as well as a willingness (not always defensible in its immediate products) of white writers to ‘swap identities’ and experiment with writing in black dialect. Such reciprocity has not been preserved, either in the canonical accounts of the period nor in the subsequent literary environment. It is one of the great contributions of Nelson’s exacting historical work, therefore, to bring into contemporary circulation a rich collection of black literary work. While the suppression of the ‘minor’ radical literature of the period is all too understandable, given the cultural politics of the Cold War, the shocking neglect of black literature—a major indictment of the canonical methods of exclusion practiced by the normative academy—revealed by Nelson here is incomprehensible.

PAT KIRKHAM

THE NEW LOOK

• Jane Gaines and Charlotte Herzog (editors) Fabrications: Costume and the Female Body (New York/London: Routledge, 1990), 295pp., £9.99 Pbk. From the moment I heard about this book and its editors I was excited. Excited because it seemed that here at last was a collection of essays that touched on aspects of my own academic work that had been developing in far greater isolation than I wished. Jane Gaines and Charlotte Herzog, on the other side of the Atlantic, have been breaking down disciplinary boundaries and bringing together film studies, women’s studies, design history (or at least dress/costume history) and cultural studies in similar but slightly dif ferent ways to a small group of people in Britain. My excitement did not diminish as I read this wide-ranging and extremely scholarly book, the feminist project of which is proclaimed loud and clear. I want to go beyond stating that it should be on the reading list for every film-studies, dress-history and cultural-studies course to hoping that each and every reader will obtain as much pleasure and stimulation from reading it as I have done. Fabrications focuses on a wide variety of issues related to the female body and to dress. The title plays beautifully on the notion of the manufacture and construction of clothes (a major world industry) and bodies (becoming an industry in itself) and also of the manufacture and construction of images but gives little indication (apart from the film stills on the cover) of the extent to which it is rooted in film studies. The editors came to film studies via American University departments of English and Art respectively and have moved into one area of design history, namely the history of dress. They have written jointly elsewhere on dress and film, fusing interests in theory, textual analysis and ‘art’ (for which in film we should nearly always substitute ‘design’). I have come to film studies via history, and more particularly design history, and what this book offers is the common ground of feminist analysis, dress history and film studies. Perm any combination of these interests and this book will delight and enthral you. Jane Gaines’s excellent introduction reminds us that today’s climate is more hospitable to feminist investigation of clothes than ‘Second

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Wave’ feminism’s uneasiness about clothes and glamour and examines the moment when academic feminists found they could ‘have their cake and eat it’, because ‘pleasure had become a legitimate category of analysis’. Elizabeth Wilson (and others) had pointed out ‘the most important thing about fashion is not that it oppresses women’ and ‘resistance’ was on the agenda. (p. 7) Gaines goes on to offer thoughtful yet succinct summaries of theories related to consumption, voyeurism, fetishism and to masquerade as she offers a framework within which the essays can be placed. Gaines correctly points out how difficult it is to separate out issues related to the body and to dress (quoting Barthes’ essay on the well-known designer Erté on the way) (p. 1). Whilst the emphasis on the body and dress makes the book as a whole a new departure in feminist film theory and also challenges and extends current, many would say now orthodox, notions around ‘the gaze’ and masquerade, individual contributions mainly address either costume or the body, but rarely both. The same applies to the cross of ‘disciplinary’ boundaries which Gaines’s introduction does so well. The authors clearly do not see this book as simply about film but the disproportionate emphasis not just on film (seven out of eleven essays) and Hollywood film in particular, but also on feminist film theory, as opposed to new approaches in design history and cultural studies, leaves those essays which do not focus on film or film theory somewhat in isolation. The anthology opens with Elizabeth Wilson’s ‘All the rage’, a splendid reworking of themes from her Adorned In Dreams (1985). It is offered here as representative of new developments in British feminist dress history and, I would argue, design history in general. Apart from the reference to Wilson herself in the introduction, however, these developments are not discussed and barely appear in an enormous bibliography. The latter, like the book, favours Hollywood (two pages on Hollywood costume as opposed to only three on the whole of fashion, body and consumer culture) and feminist film theory and cultural studies at the expense of recent feminist design history (which only gets about five of the approximately three hundred ‘general’ cultural and theoretical entries). Design history is more advanced in Britain (where The Journal of Design History is published by OUP) than in the USA. The situation is different in cultural studies as such, although Gaines does praise ‘the British contribution’ and the excellent piece by Angela McRobbie ‘Fame, Flashdance, and fantasies of achievement’ (chap. 3) is placed as an example of the new British cultural studies of ‘resistance’ as much as a piece that touches on dress and film. McRobbie’s article provides much food for thought about the ‘construction’ of the body as does Laurie Schulze on bodybuilding (‘On the muscle’, chap. 4), but neither pull together both the body and dress. The strength of McRobbie’s piece lies in the consideration of female fantasies in a ballet novel and popular-dance movies as symbolic escape routes from class and ethnic as well as ‘feminine’ constraints. It is a fascinating study but more

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discussion on the dance gear itself, with its connotations of beauty, sport and sex appeal would have been appropriate for this anthology. Similarly, in Schulze’s piece, which raises the complicated issue of exactly what is defined as ‘feminine’ and ‘masculine’ in terms of the body as well as considering the body as a site of resistance, I found it hard not to relate her illustrations of bikini-clad women bodybuilders to the apparently trivial but crucial issue of the lined (read ‘padded’) bra top in Pumping Iron II—an interesting conjuncture for a discussion of clothes and the body. The relationship of peculiarly and particularly draped clothes to a naked body is also raised in Serafina Bathrick’s article on the nineteenth-century colossal statues of women as idealized ‘femininity’ shown at industrial and world’s fairs as a form of mass spectacle at a time when women were marginal to industrial and artistic production. Then follow seven articles which relate to film and also to each other. Elizabeth Nielsen’s exemplary study of the role and working conditions of Hollywood costumes, ‘Handmaidens of the Glamor Culture’, is a solid and straightforward piece of social and economic history which relates well to Charles Eckert’s pioneering ‘The Carol Lombard in Macy’s window’ which details the links between film costume, press book promotions and retail fashions in the 1930s. This, in turn, dovetails well with Maureen Turim’s ‘Designing Women: the Emergence of the New Sweetheart line’ in the late 1940s and 1950s, Jeanne Thomas Allen’s study of Fig Leaves (a 1926 film which uses Eve’s ‘I haven’t a thing to wear’ as the driving force of the narrative and introduced colour for the fashion-show sequence), and Charlotte Herzog’s impressive study of the fashion show in feature films. The latter two also link with Gaines’s ‘Costume and Narrative’, sections of which lead into Gaylyn Studlar’s scholarly reworking of theories of masochism and masquerade through a study of Marlene Dietrich (who better?). To summarize these pieces thus in order to highlight the links, however, does not do justice to the meaty scholarship and sophisticated writing contained within them. Allen, for instance, locates the promotional aspects of film, including glamorous dress, in bourgeois pride in property ownership and, in particular, to the ‘opulent realism’ of the theatre. She also informs us that Adam’s reply to Eve was ‘Ever since you ate that apple you’ve had the gimmies—first twin beds and now clothes’ (p. 124), thereby linking consumption ‘naturally’ and ‘inevitably’ to women. Herzog engages in a detailed study of camera shots and their semiotics in relation to the display of contemporary fashions in film to offer new ways of thinking about ‘the gaze’. She argues that the ‘shopper’s gaze’ which, as we all know is highly skilled at reading fashionable dress, relates to the ‘trying on’ of the outfit (or hairdo or make-up) by the viewer/ customer and suggests that in the ‘fashion show’ films the gaze certainly goes beyond the male spectator/owner directly to women who, as audience, are invited ‘to look to learn how to transfer themselves into a “look” by comparison with another woman who is “looked at”’ (p. 159).

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Turim’s study of the ‘Sweetheart’ line is a more orthodox piece of dress history, though none the less interesting for that. She sets the scene well with a discussion of dress during World War II, the ‘refeminization’ of women after 1945 and Dior’s ‘New Look’ of 1947. She considers dresses which connoted princess, true woman, debutante and bride but it is difficult to equate the modestly draped shoulders, decorous neckline and innocent flowers adorning certain Grace Kelly characters with the ‘tight bare bodice’ which she defines as part of the ‘Sweetheart’ line. The nipped-in waist and full billowing skirts are certainly there for the princess brides but need considerable differentiation from the strapless, bare and sexy versions which I remember best on Elizabeth Taylor. These have their roots in ‘Gilda’ style glamour and late 1940s sophisticated Paris evening gowns such as those illustrated earlier in the book in Elizabeth Wilson’s article (Fig. 2.4, p. 35). Gaines’s ‘Costume and narrative’ deserves a review to itself. In an area ‘literally untouched by film scholars’ she looks at changing ideas and practices vis-à-vis costume from the silent screen to the talkies, arguing that in the former dress style and fabrics served the narrative by emphasizing emotions or characteristics which had to be conveyed through gesture and movement and links this to nineteenth-century theories of the ‘inner and outer’ in human personality. Sound and dialogue later took over some of the ‘burdens of dress’ but the legacy from the silent era was a tendency towards metaphysical literalization in costume design (p. 188). Costume is often discussed as spectacular design or product promotion but Gaines cautions us against over-simplification, pointing out how certain directors underplayed costume for reasons of narrative coherence and economy of shot. Gaines’s case study of the ‘most fully developed rhetoric of motion picture costume’ (p. 203) in melodramas c. 1920–50 is a model of how to break new ground, shifting as it does with consummate ease from descriptions of extravagant outfits to drawing parallels between musical and vestural codes and their typifying functions within the genre. She reminds us that very little work has been done on dress and melodrama—those two great ‘women’s’ art forms— but I am sure that from now on there will be. The shifts between ‘star’ and film character draw on our fascination with masquerade and the closing article by Gaylyn Studlar, whilst appearing to modestly focus on Dietrich and masquerade, offers a theoretical alternative to Laura Mulvey’s position on spectatorship. Once again, the point is hammered home that in feminist attempts to explain how sexual difference is represented in the cinema, dress has been surprisingly neglected just as current psychoanalytical discourse on film undervalues the role of dress in the pleasure of viewing. What is offered is a theory of visual pleasure that accounts for some subversive possibilities, in terms of identification and desire, that question rather than reaffirm male domination, disrupt traditional male/female gender rules, and ‘may even subvert the heterosexual presumption’ (p. 230).

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Drawing on the work of Gilles Deleuze and others, she seeks to shift film studies away from the obsession with woman as phallic substitute and film costume as necessarily oppressive to women. The direct and immediate erotic rapport between woman viewer and female protagonist in Dietrich films such as Blonde Venus is used to explore how ‘masochistic masquerade’ (largely cross-dressing) breaks down patriarchal polarities of sexual difference. Eroticized images can now offer pleasure, identification and even desire, woman to woman, unmediated by the male gaze. Studlar argues a strong and convincing case but sensibly sounds a note of caution (possibly out of fear that her ‘line’ might become a new orthodoxy) and reminds us that although the single monolithic Oedipal/castration model is insufficient to explain the complex pleasures of a Dietrich film, they are just that—complex. I congratulate all those involved with the production of this book, particularly the editors, which represents feminist scholarship at its very best —stimulating, scholarly and profound.

ALEC McHOUL

THE PROCESSED WORLD

• Chris Carlson with Mark Leger (editors) Bad Attitude: The Processed World Anthology (London/New York: Verso, 1990), 286pp., $Aus 29.95. Does the information age have a proletariat? You betcha sweet ass it does. If Marx is still remembered today, he is remembered as an economist, political theorist and philosopher. But his role as ethnographer of the British working class in the nineteenth century is often forgotten: the relevant and copious pages of Capital are hardly referred to. But in the 1980s and 1990s, a different literate proletariat has emerged, with access to complex communication devices and the ability to write and disseminate the fine details of its own conditions of existence. One site for this has been the magazine Processed World, begun in San Francisco in 1981 and dedicated to becoming ‘a forum for “ordinary” workers’ (p. 7). Hence from page 242: THE AVERAGE DAY

1 hour of TV with breakfast 4 hours on VDT at work 45 minutes of Tele-shopping at lunch 4 hours on VDT at work 1 hour dinner preparation—TV on 5 hours TV during and after dinner 8¼ hours sleep Or, could you say what the following text is? The time has come when you should recognize that it is the duty of every worker to give a full day’s work for a full day’s pay. Too many who are on the job are job holders rather than workers. They are frequently willing to give a full hour’s work for a full day’s pay. That isn’t the way a business operates if it expects to survive. All employers have the right to expect each worker to produce more than he is paid to

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produce. That ‘more’ constitutes the profit requisite for business survival. Marx’s Kapital for Beginners? In fact it’s part of ‘a genuine typing test administered by Temps, Inc., in San Francisco’ (p. 81). But this anthology may be more than just a forum for gripes and the inevitable ‘shared experiences’ of Californian culture. It’s also a serious but enjoyable handbook of industrial subversion: from ‘stealing’ employers’ time to computer sabotage. In the best traditions of satire, the humour works towards solidarity, collective anger and action against a powerful minority: The Man. Compare the shared complaint with the strategic calculation: What commonly happens…is: divorce, a job they hate, a house in suburbia, out of control children. And of course the Television God. TV sets ideals for these sheep. It is far more corrupting than it is educating. I suppose it’s not what you watch, but how you watch it. (Donna the Dead—Concord, CA, p. 269) [Computer sabotage is] only the visible tip of the iceberg! We ourselves and others fight daily in a less ostensible way. With computers, like with the army, police or politics, in fact, like with all privileged instruments of power, errors are the rule, and working them out takes up the majority of programmers’ time! We take advantage of this, which undoubtedly costs our employers more than the material damage we cause. (p. 169) Who is this new articulate and diverse proletariat? In effect it’s the shitkickers, the providers of the necessary manual and material labour for the maintenance and reproduction of largely immaterial information commodities. Offices need mail clerks, buildings need janitors and cleaners, the garbage has to be taken out. Before they can be turned to profit, the data have to be typed in, files have to be kept and other workers’ activities logged and surveyed. Someone has to make the coffee and prepare the food; some messages still have to be taken physically by courier across cities; visitors have to be met at reception and the company car-fleet serviced. Even in Silicon Valley, the children of info-tech workers have to be educated and their pets groomed; drugs and sex have to be supplied as means of ‘coping’ with boring jobs. And so on through a long list of menial tasks, rewarded by low pay and almost nonexistent job security. Not surprisingly, then, from its inception Processed World has been strongly guided by working women, and in fact it began under the auspices of the Nasty Secretaries Liberation Front, a group committed to ‘the collective power of information handlers to subvert the circulation of capital’ (p. 8). In this sense, the money-sex-time nexus bulks large. As resident poet Linda Thomas writes:

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Eight and a half of my twelve years working experience were in the sexfor-money market. The last three and a half I have worked in the socalled ‘straight’ sector. I’ve never really been able to separate the two working experiences. Though they are vastly different, they are both firmly rooted in the same money market. (p. 243) The Processed World group has also undertaken a number of direct action and agit prop campaigns: doctoring information handed out at executive conf erences, working with unions and Working Women (WW)—though it is equally active against trade-union myopia, bureaucracy and authoritarianism —and organizing street protests against wage labour. This last action is somewhat curious since the articles in the Anthology attest to a strong tendency for American info-tech industries to employ their lowest level workers as temps and/or on piece rates: Like most delivery services, Fly By Night did not pay its bikers an hourly wage. Pay was based on a strict commission—a percentage of the delivery cost. That meant having to bust your ass to make any kind of livable wage. When you tried your bloody best to go fast and make money, everything and everybody seemed to be doing their best to slow you down. (p. 51) In this case at least, a move to wage slavery would surely be a progressive step? So ultimately, what Processed World and its anthology aims at is an understanding and analysis of actual conditions by and for workers themselves and a forum of support for overt and, more often, covert industrial action (see ‘Ten ways to wreck a video display terminal’, pp. 62–3; ‘Sabotage: the ultimate video’, pp. 59–66). And significantly, the magazine is a material instance of its own philosophy: it’s frequently written and produced by readervolunteers on company time and equipment. Here it’s interesting to note how contributors address one another and their magazine: ‘Dear real people’, ‘Fellow button pushers’, ‘Dear comrades-in-arms’, ‘In Processed World I find a sane voice in the midst of madness’, ‘I got a great deal from the friends I made at Processed World…namely the feeling that I was not alone in my utter frustration and despair at having to be an office worker’, and so on. The tone and the point of application is subjective idealism; the politics both piecemeal and libertarian. Accordingly, some readers have become frustrated with Processed World’s critique: ‘To change society, it helps dramatically to know what you want to change it into. The power of your publication would be greatly increased if you began to address these questions’ (p. 270). In response to this criticism the magazine’s staff firmly reject any kind of vanguardism or any master blueprint for a worker-controlled state. Instead the editors reply as follows:

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I…feel like a member of a fifth column poised to sow dissent, divulge secrets, or otherwise undermine the corporate structure. I do not think there will be a revolution, or a strong shift in values in my lifetime. But I believe it is important to maintain our humanity. (p. 272) Do we have a model we look to? Not really…. For me sabotage is one way of striking back, of saying that I am real, I do count, and I am not entirely powerless. (pp. 273–4) What would you do on Monday morning if the buying and selling of human time was abolished? I’d try to start or join some kind of affinity group, collective, union, or ‘community’ to discuss what is still worth doing and what isn’t. Now is that wildly utopian or what? (pp. 275–6) The crux of a new social movement, in my opinion, should revolve around what we do and why we do it…. In essence this means a return to individual subjectivity, combined with an awareness that human freedom is found in cooperation, in a society free from coercive social institutions like money/wage-labour, national frontiers, hierarchical power, corporations, etc…. We make no claims to having the answers, and we don’t want to be just a ‘bitching and moaning’ ‘zine. But we also don’t want to get caught in a ‘realistic’ politics that force one to a policy of social reform as the best we can hope for. (p. 278) But can this and will it have lasting effects, in terms of the info-tech labour market and industrial relations, or more generally in terms of a critique and reconstruction of American society? Can consciousness-raising have material effects? It may be apocryphal but I am told that, when Lenin was asked to name the most important f actor in the success of the revolution, he pointed into the back room where he kept his spirit duplicator. The difference today is that the very commodities on which capital depends for its profits are themselves increasingly informational and this puts informational strategies for social change into a double-bind. On the one hand it is positive: workers who handle and process informational commodities can quite easily subvert their contents and their distribution. On the other hand it is negative: the product of informational subversion is always consumable as merely another commodity in the market, whether it be a pirated CD which continues to make a record popular, illegal software which supports the official trade in how-to-use manuals, the hacker who becomes security consultant to the big corporation, or an attractive coffee-table book of articles and graphics on industrial subversion at $29.95.

GRAEME TURNER

‘LOOK MUM, NO HANDS’: THE TRIVIAL PURSUIT OF TEXTUAL ANALYSIS

• Gary Day (editor) Readings in Popular Culture: Trivial Pursuits? (London: Macmillan, 1990), 290pp., £10.99 Pbk. Readings in Popular Culture: Trivial Pursuits? is a collection of readings of, among other things, T-shirts, bodybuilding, crime fiction, football, cricket, television and war toys. It is advertised, immodestly, as the ‘first book since Roland Barthes’ Mythologies to take a comprehensive look at popular culture’ (I’d argue with every one of these claims, including the one that has Mythologies as itself ‘comprehensive’). It is also a book which takes its readership (presumably undergraduate students) seriously in that there is a genuine attempt to make accessible, and thus popularize, cultural studies’ modes of textual analysis. While there are certainly plenty of arguments about the politics of such popularizing work, there are also plenty of arguments which support cultural studies’ acceptance of a pedagogic responsibility to a wider audience than its specialized institutions. And, of course, one hardly needs any longer to state one’s comfort with the idea that the analysis of the practices and material structures of everyday life (the ‘trivial pursuits’ of the book’s subtitle) is worthwhile. Nevertheless, this book is ultimately a very depressing, and often irritating, read. The project of the book is not the problem; the execution is. For the most part, the ‘trivial pursuits’ are not the texts being analyzed but the analyses themselves. With the occasional exception, such as Helena Blakemore’s piece on Acid House, these analyses are essentially exercises in performance art. The analyst picks up a chunk of apparently meaningless everyday life and perf orms a series of manoeuvres which produce ‘the’ meaning. Thus, for Paul O’Flinn, American logos on T-shirts ‘appear to be designed to recruit the world’s youth for the CIA, equipping them with uniforms which proclaim and contribute towards American cultural hegemony and military domination’ (p. 73). On the other hand, deciding not to buy T-shirts with logos—that is, wearing plain T-shirts—is a gesture of resistance which is compared to the ‘instinctive refusal of the vast majority, in spite of strenuous appeals, to drink fizzy beer, vote Conservative, buy shares in British Gas or take out private

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health insurance’ (p. 74). The notions of domination and resistance employed here (and elsewhere in the book) are crude, to say the least, and they are implicated in a deeply ambivalent attitude to the popular which makes the book read like a Barthesardized version of Richard Hoggart or Dwight MacDonald—complete with the familiar spectres of Americanization and the erosion of taste. At least with Hoggart and MacDonald, though, the analyses were in the service of a particular argument—they were not an end in themselves. Readings in Popular Culture simply, shamelessly, offers its analyses as objects to be admired and emulated, as products of a practice that is ontologically circular. The reluctance to put these readings to some use is visible in a strategy used repeatedly as a means of moving out of the analysis once it has been performed. Representative is Gary Day’s piece on bodybuilding which concludes: Ultimately, the bodybuilder with his or her imposing physique is a reminder of the power of human potential but also of how it can be grotesquely distorted. The challenge is to release that potential, redirecting it against the system which frustrates and thwarts it. This is a task requiring vision and imagination; unfashionable words but they offer more hope than some recent critical theory with its emphasis on how human projects are always doomed to deconstruct. Such pessimism can only gladden the hearts of those who wish to keep things as they are. (p. 58) At the point where Day’s own ‘deconstruction’ of the meaning of bodybuilding as a spectacle might actually amount to something useful—by moving beyond the reading of signs to thinking about what they might mean for those whose bodies are doing the signifying—any further thought is referred on to those with more ‘vision and imagination’. Clearly ‘theory’, pessimistic and antihumanistic as it is, has no hope of taking us into such territories. Indeed, as Day’s dark mutterings about the cultural pessimism of ‘some recent’ deconstructionists imply, theory may actually get in the way of understanding (or, perhaps, of ‘imagining’) the workings of power within the popular. And if that is the case, then, there is little point in chasing its chimeras any further. Enough said, you know? This strategy would not be so irritating if it were not so frequently used. Indeed, the introductory chapter sets the pattern by closing with just such a deferral, refusing to take a position on exactly what it is that enables these textual analyses to occur at all: There is a real problem here, for no-one would wish to dispute that a popular culture can distort reality but equally, if popular culture provides us with structures of perception, then how is it possible to get

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outside them so that we can make some objective comments about reality? If this volume does not provide an answer to this question it is hoped that it will at least keep people talking about it. (p. 12) Well, put like this, it doesn’t and it won’t. Theoretically, this is illiterate; with some goodwill, one can recognize what is attempting to be said and, thus, its idealist and contradictory nature. On the one hand we have a view of popular culture which sees its processes working to constitute the real, while on the other there is an independently existing ‘real’ which is ‘distorted’ by popular cultural processes and for which we must aim to generate an ‘objective’ account. This notion of objectivity is, of course, something that the theoretical positions deployed elsewhere in the book (and in this introduction) work to displace. More importantly, if the book can provide no more coherent explanation than this of how these readings are produced, from what position and to what end, then it is hard to understand just what the collection thinks it is doing. This reticence in explaining the stance of the ‘mythologist’ is not always matched by a comparable modesty in the scale of the analyses; at times, they manage to be at once ambitious and banal. Here is Gary Day on bodybuilding, microscopes, cameras and university philosophy departments: This general emphasis on the body has to be seen in conjunction with a technology which makes everything visible; the microscope and the camera combine to make the world the sum of its appearance. One effect of this is to banish interiority, pursuits associated with the inner life start to vanish; one notes, for example, the disappearance of philosophy departments in polytechnics and universities. (p. 49) The monumental glibness of this explanation of the decline of philosophy departments is representative in its apparent disinterest in history, or in the functioning of institutions within culture. At such moments the implicit arrogance and promiscuity of an ahistorical textual analysis is painfully visible. If this is the future of textual analysis, then it is time we started rewriting its past. Which brings me to my major problem with the book, its resonance as a sign that cultural studies’ versions of textual analysis have now become installed as a professionalized and ahistorical practice through which an academic élite authorizes its cultural judgements—in much the way the formalist analysis of literature has done. In Readings in Popular Culture, this practice is often performed with an air of self-regarding chic which may be a pointer to new motivations fuelling the current surge of interest in cultural studies. Cary Nelson recently challenged a similar sign in the USA, a cultural studies conference in Oklahoma which, incredibly, featured a keynote address

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from J.Hillis Miller. Nelson uses the occasion to attack the opportunism of American appropriations of cultural studies within English departments, and the level of ignorance of cultural studies’ intellectual history evident in so many who would locate their work within it. While he is primarily occupied by what he calls a ‘manifesto’ for cultural studies, Nelson raises some general concerns that are relevant to the ways in which cultural studies has been taken up in more locations than Oklahoma: Of all the intellectual movements that have swept the humanities in America over the last twenty years, none will be taken up so shallowly, so opportunistically, so unreflectively, and so ahistorically as cultural studies. It is becoming the perfect paradigm for a people with no sense of history—born yesterday and born on the make. A concept with a long history of struggle over its definition, a concept born in class consciousness and in critique of the academy, is often for English in America little more than a way of repackaging what we were already doing. Of course nothing can prevent the term ‘cultural studies’ from coming to mean something very different in another time and place. But the casual dismissal of its history needs to be seen for what it is—an interested effort to depoliticise a concept whose whole prior history has been preeminently political and oppositional. (Nelson, 1991:25–6) What this emphasizes is not so much the need to police the boundaries of the field of study, refusing entry to those who do not have the required background. Rather, Nelson alerts us to the ease with which cultural studies can lose its point, the reason why it mattered in the first place. Readings in Popular Culture: Trivial Pursuits stands as evidence that cultural studies is in danger of being reduced to a repertoire of moves on a predominantly textualized terrain, moves whose motivation or productivity matters less than the styles with which they are perf ormed. The kid who calls out ‘look mom, no hands’ as he rides his bike is using that bike as an apparatus for display, rather than as a mode of transport which might take him somewhere. My complaint about this book, and my worry about the trivializing pursuit of textual analysis it represents, is that it does pretty much the same thing. Reference Nelson, Cary (1991) ‘Always already cultural studies: two conferences and a manifesto’, Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association, 24(1), 24–38.

MARTYN LEE

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• Derek Robbins, The Work of Pierre Bourdieu (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1991), 240pp., £11.95 Pbk. For some time now the ideas of the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu have been seen as an important theoretical and methodological resource for those working in the field of cultural studies. Yet when set against the substantial, at times obsessive, attention that the ideas of other French writers (most notably Baudrillard and Foucault) have received in Britain and North America over the last few years, Bourdieu remains a relatively neglected figure. Notwithstanding several useful précis of Bourdieu’s work (see esp. Garnham and Williams, 1980; Honneth, 1986; Wilson, 1988), Derek Robbins’s The Work of Pierre Bourdieu represents the first book-length attempt to provide a comprehensive appraisal of Bourdieu’s theories for an English readership. Perhaps some part of this curious neglect can be blamed on Bourdieu’s persistent refusal to engage in some of the more fashionable issues of contemporary academic concern, particularly those falling under the rubrics of postmodernism and postmodernity. Similarly, Bourdieu’s convoluted and occasionally discursive prose style, whether this is deemed to be legitimate or not, has apparently done him no favours in bringing his ideas to a wider readership than is presently the case. More significantly, perhaps, I suspect that Bourdieu’s uncompromising critique of the symbolic violence that is to be found within the culture of higher education has, on some occasions at least, been met by the educators and academics with a tacit reluctance to probe too deeply ideas that would potentially undermine their own symbolic power. When set against this background I have to say that The Work of Pierre Bourdieu goes some considerable distance towards filling the void of critical discussion that Bourdieu’s ideas so rightly deserve. Derek Robbins’s approach to Bourdieu’s substantial body of work has been to provide a rigorous and strictly chronological account of the development of Bourdieu’s epistemological position. The book therefore begins with a detailed discussion of Bourdieu’s early Algerian research into the Kabyle society and his investigations of the encroachment of the urban values of an

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emerging modern industrial society into the traditional culture of the people of the Béarn region of southern France. However, far more than simply representing descriptive summaries of this early work, the book’s intention here is to demonstrate the way that this early anthropological research can, in retrospect, be seen to mark the beginning of Bourdieu’s quest to establish a theoretically tenable framework by which to analyze social action. Although clearly positioned within a structuralist analytical paradigm, Bourdieu’s early research reveals initial signs of a certain disquiet with the theoretical assumptions which underscored structuralism. Orthodox structural anthropology had tended to assume that the execution of social action was regulated by a number of pre-given or ‘universalistic’ rules. But evidence from both Algeria and the Béarn seemed to indicate to Bourdieu that these supposedly regular rules, be they those structuring matrimonial exchange in Kabyle society or the role of the dance in the Béarn, were often open to a degree of reinterpretation according to the exact social, economic and geographic realities in which they functioned. The recognition of an apparent flexibility in the symbolic structures which were thought to govern social action is pinpointed as a dominant theme throughout all of Bourdieu’s subsequent work. From this stance, the overarching theoretical project that has been undertaken by Bourdieu has sought to explore the criteria governing the circumstances under which human agents are allowed to negotiate the pregiven symbolic order of their social world and adapt it to fit their own unique situations. Indeed, it was from this initial observation that Bourdieu came to develop a theoretical stance which would eventually force him to break with the more orthodox versions of structuralism. Structuralist theories of social reproduction, particularly those presented by Lévi-Strauss and later by Althusser, had tended to reduce the status of the subject to that of the unwitting object of the predetermined symbolic structures which housed all forms of social action. For Bourdieu, however, subjects were always thought to retain a certain capacity for ‘inventive performance’, a term which, while not suggesting subjects to be freely calculating and sovereign initiators of their actions, none the less strives to capture the sense that subjects are always able to manoeuvre between the pre-structured co-ordinates of their social world and the almost limitless potential of future practices. Just as the game of chess imposes a fixed set of rules upon any given game of play but in no way obliges the players to follow a predetermined series of moves or a prescribed game-plan, then so too does the objective social world impose a certain logic of action upon subjects without ever determining the exact form that such action may take in any concrete or last instance. In tracing this delicate line between the determinist and voluntarist biases in theorizing social action, Bourdieu has increasingly come to employ the notion of habitus. In essence the habitus is said to denote the group-specific cluster of cultural dispositions and temperaments that are at once the structured product of the objective conditions of existence of the group as

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well as being the structuring and generative principles which provide for the group’s consistent but flexible repertoire of cultural practices. As Robbins neatly puts it, the habitus ‘interfaces between constructive human agency and constraining social structures’ (p. 75). The habitus thus represents a perception-enabling prism which implicitly informs and gives a certain logic to social action and cultural judgement but never reduces such action and judgement to the mere function of existing social structures. The habitus that is common to a social group is manifest as a particular cultural orientation—a cultural ‘world-view’—which finds its objectification in the specific practices and object preferences that are likely to be shared by a given cultural community. The development of the notion of habitus therefore allowed Bourdieu the opportunity to understand better the principles by which cultural groups both understand and ‘manage’ their social situations. Hence, if we take the term culture to refer to that domain of social activity where the social experience of groups is given symbolic order and classified by distinctive patterns of behaviour and action, then the notion of habitus gives Bourdieu the theoretical space that is necessary for a sensitive analysis of class struggle conducted through and at the level of culture. For this reason culture is seen by Bourdieu not as the mere symbolic articulation or reflection of already constituted social structures, and certainly not as some detached or isolated sphere of aesthetic and intellectual contemplation; rather, culture becomes the vital terrain of class struggle upon which groups compete to establish a symbolic order which is the most sympathetic to their own interests. For much of the 1960s and 1970s Bourdieu’s research into the dynamics of cultural struggle concentrated upon the sphere of education. Given Robbins’s own academic interest in the field of educational policy it is not surprising that The Work of Pierre Bourdieu contains a particularly thorough appraisal of Bourdieu’s attempts to investigate pedagogic practice. Here Robbins details how, in a number of important texts (most notably Les Héritiers (1964), Les Etudiants et leurs études (1964), La Reproduction (1970) and most recently Homo academicus (1984)), Bourdieu has explored the latent function of the French university system. Contrary to the familiar claims that the post-war expansion in higher education has resulted in a democratization of knowledge and a widening of occupational choice for those people from less privileged social backgrounds, Bourdieu’s research into educational practices insists that the institutionalized pedagogy found within higher education retains a deep bias towards middle-class students while effectively marginalizing the educational needs of those working-class students that this expansion had claimed to embrace. The notion that access to knowledge is open equally to all those who pass through the university system, irrespective of class origin, is, argues Bourdieu, a myth. This successfully obscures the fact that knowledge transmitted through the university system has first been coded, valued and prioritized via a general discourse that is ideally attuned to cater for middle-class expectations and perceptions of the social world. Middle-

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class students therefore find their existing cultural world-view mirrored and reproduced in the symbolic structures of the academy while the typical habitus formation of the working-class student struggles to accommodate this essentially alien culture into a form that may produce meaningful perceptions and practices. From this perspective the real function of higher education is not the democratization of knowledge and the widening of access to hitherto privileged occupational status, but always the efficient regulation of such access to that class for whom it has always been intended. Apart from its intrinsic value as a body of work with which to explore the possibilities of establishing a genuinely radical and progressive pedagogy, Bourdieu’s research into education has also allowed him to identify the means by which a primary social institution such as education functions to control the allocation of symbolic power generally in advanced industrial societies. Retaining the core notion that the basis of all social power rests upon the establishment of relationships of difference, Bourdieu argues that symbolic power derives from the production and subsequent articulation of social difference at a cultural level. Using an economic metaphor, Bourdieu suggest that just as economic power, if it is to be quantified and operationalized, must find objective substance in the form of economic capital, then so too must symbolic power find its objectification in the form of cultural capital. Cultural capital is defined as those acquired cultural skills and competences that have been derived from an investment of time spent chiefly, although not exclusively, in education. For those class-fractions for whom education has provided a natural home, the cultural competences and skills it bestows upon them in the form of cultural capital allow for the possibility of relatively exclusive modes of cultural consumption and privileged schemas of symbolic classification. Hence the more shrewd the investment of cultural capital into cultural activities, then the greater will be the yield of symbolic capital and power; that is, the metaphorical quantities of status and prestige, as recognized and therefore validated by others, which may be derived from the skilful manipulation of social signs and symbols. The relatively valued cultural taxonomies which are generated by a group’s schema of classification become visible as class taste. They are not only to be revealed in the most obvious of cultural fields, such as dress sense, house layout, and preferences in cinema, music, painting, sport and architecture, but are also to be seen in those most naturalized of activities: moral disposition, political preferences, humour, taste in food, and even bodily deportment. In La Distinction (1978), Bourdieu’s monumental account of French cultural relations in the post-war years, Bourdieu demonstrates, with painstaking attention to empirical detail, how all forms of cultural activity, be they the seemingly trivial manner in which food is eaten and the body is held or the ‘serious’ appreciation of aesthetic and intellectual endeavour, serve to consolidate and reproduce cultural differences and thereby galvanize the struggle to monopolize symbolic power.

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Of all of Bourdieu’s works, La Distinction has, with some justification, received by far the most critical discussion and acclaim. At first glance it would seem curious therefore that Robbins has devoted relatively little space to a direct discussion of the contents of La Distinction, choosing instead to focus in detail on many of the earlier texts. On deeper consideration however, there is seen to be a real value to this approach. For instead of treating La Distinction as a self-contained theoretical statement where the ideas it embodies may appear to have been born of some immaculate conception, The Work of Pierre Bourdieu, in outlining the development of the intellectual position Bourdieu occupies in La Distinction, allows us to glimpse the manner in which this position has evolved gradually, and often tortuously, through work begun at least twenty years earlier. In this respect Robbins reveals to us how many of the texts which predate La Distinction can be read as systematic attempts to overcome the theoretical inadequacies of objectivist accounts of the symbolic order. This can be seen clearly, for example, in the emergence of the concept of habitus which Robbins traces from its origins as a term with rather limited theoretical potential in Bourdieu’s early anthropological research into the major conceptual status it currently holds. Similarly, by focusing on the significant textual differences between the 1972 publication of Esquisse d’une theory de la practice and its English ‘translation’ Outline of a Theory of Practice, published some five years later, Robbins is able to highlight the important maturation in Bourdieu’s thinking which occurred over this period. Such close attention to textual detail has obviously involved a great deal of meticulous research and organization on Robbins’s part. This is borne out by the inclusion of many informative notes as well as a comprehensive bibliography listing both the French texts and their English translations or equivalents. Indeed, The Work of Pierre Bourdieu presents itself as a scholarly and academic appraisal of Bourdieu’s ideas, a fact which may well make its reading seem a somewhat daunting prospect for those who are approaching it with only a superficial understanding of Bourdieu’s theories. In this respect I feel that the book’s rather overlong discussion on the issue of pedagogic practice may, for those unfamiliar with the wide range of material covered in Bourdieu’s work, serve to marginalize somewhat Bourdieu’s larger theoretical project which has sought to address the totality of cultural reproduction. Since one of the obvious strengths of La Distinction is the way in which Bourdieu provides us with a rich source of data on the patterns of everyday cultural consumption, then I felt that some discussion on such topics as music preference, film viewing or taste in food would have usefully served to highlight the extreme pertinence of Bourdieu’s ideas to the politics of daily life. However, when set against the depth of analysis of the topics which are discussed in The Work of Pierre Bourdieu this criticism is perhaps relatively minor and there can be no doubt that Derek Robbins has provided us with an

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immensely valuable and I suspect enduring contribution to our understanding of one of the major figures in post-war social theory. References Garnham, N. and Williams, R. (1980) ‘Pierre Bourdieu and the sociology of culture: an introduction’, Media, Culture and Society, 2, 209–23. Honneth, A. (1986) ‘The fragmented world of symbolic forms: reflections on Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology of culture’, Theory, Culture and Society, 3(3). Wilson, E. (1988) ‘Picasso and pâté de foie gras: Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology of culture’, Diacritics, Summer, 1988.

Notes on contributors

IEN ANG is Senior Lecturer in Communication Studies at Murdoch University, Perth, Western Australia…TONY BENNETT is Professor and Dean of the Division of Humanities, Griffith University, Nathan, Queensland, Australia…DIPESH CHAKRABARTY is Reader and Director of the Ashworth Centre for Social Theory, University of Melbourne, Australia… KUAN-HSING CHEN is Associate Professor at the Institute of Literature, National Tsing Hua University, Taiwan…LUKE GIBBONS is at the School of Communications of Dublin City University, Ireland…JOHN HARTLEY is Director of the Centre for Research in Culture and Communication, Murdoch University, Western Australia…STEVE MICKLER is a Ph.D. student at the School of Humanities, Murdoch University, Western Australia, and has worked for the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission in Perth… MEAGHAN MORRIS is an independent writer and cultural critic, based in Sydney, Australia…TOM O’REGAN is Senior Lecturer in Communication Studies, Murdoch University, Western Australia…ZOË SOFIA, a.k.a. Zoë Sofoulis, is Lecturer in Communication Studies, Murdoch University, Western Australia…GRAEME TURNER is Associate Professor in the Department of English, University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia… McKENZIE WARK teaches in the Department of English of Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia…BARRETT WATTEN is a poet and theorist and is managing editor of Representations. His books include Total Syntax, a collection of theoretical essays, and many volumes of experimental poetry, among them Progress and 1–10…PAT KIRKHAM teaches in the School of Arts, Leicester Polytechnic, UK…ALEC MCHOUL is at the School of Humanities, Murdoch University, Western Australia…MARTYN LEE teaches at Coventry Polytechnic, UK.

Other journals in the field of cultural studies

There has been a rapid increase in the number of journals operating both in the field of cultural studies and in overlapping areas of interest. Cultural Studies wants to keep its readers informed of the work being done by these journals. After all, cultural studies is a collective project. Announcing the formation of the Australian Cultural Studies Association. They have recently published their proceedings for the 1990 Australian Cultural Studies Conference. For information on the Association, or to purchase Proceedings, contact Dr Deborah Chambers, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, P.O. Box 10, Kingswood, New South Wales 2747, Australia. COLLEGE LITERATURE General Issue 19.1, February 1992 Contents: Henry A.Giroux Literacy, Pedagogy, and the Politics of Difference; John L.Hochheimer Toward Liberatory Pedagogy for Journalism Students; Adapting Paulo Freire’s Praxis to the Non-Poor; Marie A. Plasse The Human Body as Performance Medium in Shakespeare: Some Theoretical Suggestions from A Midsummer Night’s Dream; Michael Cohen On Reading Hamlet for the First Time; Michael Payne Johnson vs. Milton: Criticism as Inquisition; Wendell Jones, Jr. Holding up the Revealing Lamp: The Myth of Psyche in Edith Wharton’s The Reef; Elizabeth Jane Wall Hinds Visible Tracks: Historical Method and Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland. Editorial Round Table: William J.Scheick The Literary Canon and the Scholarly Journal; Donald Gray The Literary Canon and the Scholarly Journal; A Response; Holly Laird Reading the Scholarly Journal as a Can/non. Notes and Comments: Ellen Pollak Swift among the Feminists: An Approach to Teaching; Fred D.White ‘Sweet Skepticism of the Heart’: Science in the Poetry of Emily Dickinson; Sheree L.Meyer The Strife of Tongue and the Confusion of Body’: Confusion as a Pedagogical Practice; Robert Dunne Avoiding Labels: Recasting a Canon Via Myth Criticism. Book Reviews: Patti P.Gillespie Lynda Hart, ed., Making a Spectacle: Feminist Essays on Contemporary Women’s Theatre; Marie A.Plasse Barbara Freedman, Staging the Gaze: Postmodernism, Psychoanalysis, and Shakespearean Comedy, Jennie Skerl Charlotte Margolis Goodman, Jean

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Stafford: The Savage Heart; Lydia A.Schultz A. LaVonne Brown Ruoff, American Indian Literatures: An Introduction, Bibliographic Review, and Selected Bibliography, Keith E.Welsh Carl Woodring, Nature into Art: Cultural Transformations in Nineteenth-Century Britain; Françoise Lion-net Review Essay: Houston A.Baker, Jr., Workings of the Spirit: The Poetics of Afro-American Women’s Writing; Missy Dehn Kubitschek, Claiming the Heritage: African-American Women Novelists and History, Dympna C. Callaghan Review Essay: Constance Jordan, Renaissance Feminism: Literary Texts and Political Models; Sheila Fisher and Janet E.Halley, eds., Seeking the Woman in Late Medieval and Renaissance Writings: Essays in Feminist Contextual Criticism. DISCOURSE: THEORETICAL STUDIES IN MEDIA AND CULTURE (Indiana University Press, Center for Twentieth-Century Studies, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, PO Box 413, Milwaukee, Wisconsin 53201, USA. Subscriptions to: Indiana University Press, 10th and Morton Streets, Bloomington, Indiana 47405 Issue 14.1, Winter 1991–92 Beatriz Colomina Domesticity at War; Lynne Joyrich Going through the E/ Motions: Gender, Postmodernism, and Affect in Television Studies; Tara McPherson and Gareth Evens Watch This Space: An Interview with Edward Soja; Kathryn Milun (En)countering Imperialist Nostalgia: The Indian Reburial Issue; Christina von Braun (trans. Jamie Owen Daniel) Strategies of ‘Misappearance’; Gloria-Jean Masciarotte The Madonna with Child, and Another Child, and Still Another Child…: Sensationalism and the Dysfunction of Emotions; Jean-François Lyotard (trans. Georges Van Den Abbeele) Voices of a Voice. Book Reviews: Mark Rose Contested Culture: The Image, the Voice, and the Law by Jane Gaines; James Schwoch The Mode of Information: Postructuralism and Social Context by Mark Poster; Marilyn Edelstein Sexual Subversions: Three French Feminists by Elizabeth Grosz; Susan Willis Consumer Culture and Postmodernism by Mike Featherstone; Tara McPherson Feminism and Youth Culture: From Jackie to Just Seventeen by Angela McRobbie; Elizabeth Francis Subversive Intent: Gender, Politics, and the Avant-Garde by Susan Rubin Suleiman. Performance Issue(s): Happening, Body, Spectacle, Virtual Reality Discourse 14.2, Spring 1992 This issue moves, not exactly in sequence, from a retrospective on the happening out of the scene of action painting to the situationist critique of ‘the society of the spectacle’ to the extremities of performance in body art and autodestruction, including the aesthetics of paroxysm among the Viennese actionists, to the voice with no body of radiophonic art to redeployment of the body through the logic of computer programming to the projection of a ‘virtual reality’ on the edge of cyberspace. (Herbert Blau, from the Introduction) Herbert Blau The Prospect Before Us; Valie Export Persona,

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Proto-Performance, Politics: A Preface; Jon Erickson The Spectacle of the AntiSpectacle: Happenings and the Situationist International; Ferdinand Schmatz Viennese Actionism and the Vienna Group: The Austrian Avant-Garde after 1945; Kristine Stiles Survival Ethos and Destruction Art; David Crane The Rope Trick; Gerhard Johann Lischka Performance Art/Life Art/ Mediafication; Josette Féral What Is Left of Performance Art? Autopsy of a Function; Birth of a Genre; Vivian M. Patraka Binary Terror and Feminist Performance: Reading Both Ways; Allen S.Weiss Radiophonic Art: The Voice of the Impossible Body; Valère Novarina Theater of the Ears; Regina Cornwell Interaction Art: Touching the ‘Body in the Mind’; Ann LaskoHarvill Identity and Mask in Virtual Reality. Flaunting It: Essays in Lesbian and Gay Studies Discourse 15.1, Fall 1992 As a new generation of lesbian and gay scholars begins to question the parameters of academic discourse, re-imaging bodies, identities, and sexualities, new voices are emerging to challenge the limits and possibilities of institutional debate. This collection of essays—drawn from papers first presented at a conference at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee— traverses the landscape of lesbian and gay studies, invoking subjects and meanings as diverse as pornography, lesbian mystery novels, AIDS, reform school romance, (il)legal sexualities, camp, muscle magazines, and gender ambiguity to demonstrate the ways in which theorists and practitioners of sexual difference are queering the academy. Richard C.Medeiros Modernist and Postmodernist Inscriptions of Camp; June L.Reich The Traffic in Dildoes: The Phallus as Camp and the Revenue of Genderfuck; Sarah Chinn and Kris Franklin ‘I Am What I Am’ (Or Am I?): The Making and Unmaking of Lesbian and Gay Identity in High Tech Gays; JoAnn Pavletich Muscling the Mainstream: Lesbian Murder Mysteries and Fantasies of Justice; Thomas Piontek Applied Metaphors: The Construction of AIDS in Literature; Greg Mullins Nudes, Prudes, and Pigmies: The Desirability of Disavowal in Physical Culture Magazine; David Pendleton Obscene Allegories: Narrative, Representation, Pornography; Kathryn Baker Delinquent Desire: Race, Sex, and Ritual in Reform Schools for Girls; Terralee Bensinger Lesbian Pornography: The Re-Making of (a) Community. Book Reviews: Dana Beckelman Don Juan in the Village by Jane DeLynn; Cheryl Kader Stolen Glances: Lebians Take Photographs by Tessa Boffin and Jean Fraser; Stacey Wolfe Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories edited by Diana Fuss; Carmen Cavallo Engendering Men edited by Joseph A.Boone and Michael Cadden; Linnea Stensen Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers by Lillian Faderman; Mary Porter The Families We Choose by Keith Weston. Past issues of Discourse have focused on third world women, the emotions, technology, the body, and other topics. Contributors have included Joseph Roach, Elin Diamond, Jean-François, Lyotard, Susan Jeffords, Christina von

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Braun, Michael Moon and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Susan Stewart, and Rey Chow. Future issues will feature essays by Jane Gallop, Gabriele Schwab, Meaghan Morris, Rosemary Coombe, and others. CULTURE AND POLICY (Institute for Cultural Policy Studies, Division of Humanities, Griffith University, Nathan, Queensland, Australia, 4111) Special Double Issue on Youth and the Arts Volume 2, Number 2 and Volume 3, Number 1 1990/91 Contents: (Selections and Excerpts from Submissions to the Youth and the Arts Policy Development Project commissioned by the Australia Council) Articles: Tony Bennett and Jennifer Craik Introduction: Youth and the Arts; Sue Gillard Music and Young People; Sarina Marchi Non-English Speaking Background Youth; Mark Radvan New Directions in Youth Theatre; Mark Radvan Interpreting the Brisbane Youth Theatre Survey; Mike Emmison, John Frow and Graeme Turner Youth Attitudes to the Arts; Gay Mason Participation and Access for Youth in Arts Education; Tony Bennett, Toby Miller, Gillian Swanson and Gordon Tait Youth Cultures and Arts Policies; Colin Mercer and Gillian Swanson Reviewing Youth Arts: Policy Implications; Barbara Johnstone The Arts and Cultural Participation Patterns of Australian Youth: Statistical Digest; Tony Bennett Towards a Youth Arts Policy: Rationales, Objectives and Strategies. Reviews: Georgina Murray Add Women & Stir: Six Feminists Political Economy Texts; George Lafferty Australian Attitudes: Social and Political Analyses from the National Social Science Survey; Graeme Turner Nation: The Life of an Independent Journal of Opinions 1958–1972; Anthony May Lost in Music: Culture, Style and the Music Event; Peter Anderson Defining ‘The Arts’ and ‘The Cultural Industry’: Recent Publications. JOURNAL OF COMMUNICATION INQUIRY (205 Communications Center, University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA 52242, USA) Volume 15, Number 2, Summer 1991 James Hamilton Editorial; Janice Peck Religious Television and the Historical Appeal of Form; Jane Caputi Charting the Flow: The Construction of Meaning Through Juxtaposition in Media Texts; Bruce Johansen Native American Roots for Freedom of Expression as a Form of Liberty; Gregory Stephens Rap Music’s Double-Voiced Discourse: A Crossroads for Interracial Communication; Elli Lester-massman The Dark Side of Comparative Research; Patrick Daley Alvin Gouldner’s Views on the Public Sphere; Jeffrey Rutenbeck Toward a History of the Ideologies of Partisanship and Independence in American Journalism; Charles Acland ‘Tall, Dark, and Lethal’: Discourses of Sexual Transgression in the Preppy Murder. JOURNAL OF URBAN AND CULTURAL STUDIES (Donald Macedo, Journal of Urban and Cultural Studies, Department of English, University of Massachusetts at Boston, Harbor Campus, Boston, Massachusetts 02125– 3393, USA) The Pedagogy of Peace and War

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Noam Chomsky The Gulf Crisis; Noam Chomsky The New World Order. Theorizing Postmodern War Miriam Cooke Postmodern Wars: Phallomilitary Spectacles in the DTO; Donna Haraway On Wimps; Hugh Gusterson Nuclear War, the Gulf War, and the Disappearing body; Mark Driscoll Bring the Tropes Home: (Academic) Life During Wartime; George Lakoff Metaphor and War: The Metaphor System Used to Justify War in the Gulf; Judith Butler The Imperialist Subject. Teaching Postmodern Peace John Brown Childs Notes on the Gulf War, Racism, and African-American Social Thought: Ramifications for Teaching; Carol Becker Men in Suits; Craig Reinarman Political Pedagogy and Democratic Discourse: Bringing War and Peace into the Classroom; Giovanna Di Chiro and Marita Sturken Countering the Disempowerment of War; Laurie J.Sears Authoritative Voices and the Vietnam Experience: Teaching About Vietnam During the Gulf War; Carolyn M.Stephenson Peace Studies, the Gulf War, and Peace. RETHINKING MARXISM (Submissions and other editorial comments to: Jack Amariglio, Editor, Department of Economics, Merrimack College, North Andover, MA 01845. Book reviews to: Stephen Cullenberg, Department of Economics, University of California, Riverside, CA 92521. Remarx to: Richard Wolff, Department of Economics, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA 01003. Subscriptions (indicate starting issue) and checks to Rethinking MARXISM, Guildford Publications, Inc., 72 Spring St., New York, NY 10012). Marcia Landy Socialist Education Today: Pessimism or Optimism of the Intellect?; Wolfgang Fritz Haug The Surrender of the Fortress: Did the East German People Vote for the Restoration?; George DeMartino Trade-Union Isolation and the Catechism of the Left; John Pitman Weber ‘Yell’ and other art. Reading Theater Radically R.G.Davis Unwrapping and Remapping Brecht’s The Mother: The Old Left and the New Left Shuffle; Linda Kintz Gendering the Critique of Representation: Fascism, the Purified Body, and Theater in Adorno, Artaud, and Maria Irene Fornes; Julian Markels Shakespeare’s Materialism in King Lear. Remarx: Tom Bottomore Problems and Prospects of a Socialist Economy in Europe; Allan MacNeill & Ted Burczak The Critique of Consumerism in The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover. Review: Robert J.S.Ross History and Subjectivity: The Transformation of Marxism by Robert S.Gottlieb. REPRESENTATIONS (University of California Press, 2120 Berkeley Way, Berkeley, California 94720. Address books for review and manuscripts for submission to the Editors, Representations, 322 Wheeler Hall, University of California,

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Berkeley, California 94720. Address subscription orders, changes of address, and business correspondence (including requests for permissions and advertising orders) to the Journals Department, University of California Press, 2120Berkeley Way, Berkeley, CA 94720.) Number 37, Winter 1992 Special Issue: Imperial Fantasies and Postcolonial Histories Dipesh Chakrabarty Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History: Who Speaks for ‘Indian’ Pasts?; Gyanendra Pandey In Defense of the Fragment: Writing About Hindu-Muslim Riots in India Today; Nicholas B.Dirks Castes of Mind; Geoffrey Galt Harpham Abroad Only by a Fiction: Creation, Irony, and Necessity in Conrad’s The Secret Agent; Thomas Richards Archive and Utopia; Peter Metcalf Aban Jau’s Boast; Ann Laura Stoler ‘In Cold Blood’: Hierarchies of Credibility and the Politics of Colonial Narratives. PUBLIC CULTURE (Bulletin of the Center for Transnational Cultural Studies) (Submissions and subscriptions to: Public Culture, The University Museum, University of Pennsylvania, 33rd and Spruce Streets, Philadelphia, PA 19104– 6324, USA.) Volume 3, Number 2, Spring 1991 Contents: Debates and Controversies: Elizabeth G.Traube Transforming Heroes: Hollywood and the Demonization of Women; Hamid Naficy The Averted Gaze in Iranian Postrevolutionary Cinema; Ella Shohat Imaging Terra Incognita: The Disciplinary Gaze of Empire; Susan Hegeman Shopping for Identities: ‘A Nation of Nations’ and the Weak Ethnicity of Objects; Dulali Nag Fashion, Gender and the Bengali Middle Class; Disarming Images. War Talk: Collective Conversations: Bruce Robbins Two Days before the War; Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Lila Abu-Lughod Nine Days into the War; Jean Adelman, Kris Hardin, Michele Richman, Serena S.Skwersky, Susan Stewart, Peter van der Veer Twenty Days into the War; Steven Feld Twenty-nine Days into the War; Carolyn Marvin Trooping the Colors on TV; War Miscellany. MAGAZINE OF CULTURAL STUDIES (Back issues: Martin Baker, Department of Humanities, Bristol Polytechnic, Oldbury Court Road, Bristol BS16 2JP.) Issue No.3/Spring 1991 Contents: Ella Westland Dick Whittington in the 19th Century: How did the moralists of emergent capitalism cope with the questionable morality of Dick Whittington and his luck?; Alan O’Shea ‘Futures’ Conference: a report; Ian Miller Lisa, Jeff & Vic ’91: A Rear Window glimpse into a pro-filmic nightmare; Maureen McNeil After Thatcher: Reflections on Elevan Years of Gender Politics, or How did Thatcher the Tory relate to Thatcher the woman —and how did the left cope with relationship?; Steve Bennison & Andrew Spicer Cultural Studies at A Level? Plans for an A Level in our field are f ar

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advanced. What would it be like, and what problems has it met?; Bev Skeggs ‘Changing Men, Changing Politics’ Conference: a report; John Stathatos Sidney James Diamonds in Australia: a photo-text on an installation; Beverley Skeggs A Spanking Good Time. An argument counter to the common view that Madonna is contributing to male control of female sexuality; Liz Wells Black Artists’ Installation: a report; Jill Colaco Fairytales, Feminists, and my Fifteen Minutes: or, on finding yourself on Page 3…; Ian Spring In Pursuit of Trivia: On being in the grip of irrelevant knowledge and pointless activity…; Reviews; Sunpreet Arshi Radical Philosophy Conference: a report. CONTINUUM (The Australian Journal of Media & Culture) Continuum, Centre for Research in Culture & Communication, Murdoch University, Murdoch, WA, 6150, Australia. Tel: (09) 360 2734 Fax: (09) 310 6285. Contributions in the form of articles and reviews are welcome. Subscription rates are $25 for individuals and $45 for institutions per volume. Individual copies are available for $12.50 for individuals and $22.50 for institutions. Overseas rates are in US dollars. Cheques should be made payable to Continuum. Volume 6:1(1992) Contents: Toby Miller An Editorial Introduction for Radio. Radio Practice: David Rowe ‘Just Warming ‘em up’: Radio Talkback And Its Renditions; Niall Lucy Radio Management: Sectors, Structures, Styles; Jonathan Dawson JJJ: Radical Radio?; Gabrielle O’Ryan Oh Bondage: Up Yours!; Irma Whitford Public Radio: The Promise and the Performance; Jonathan Dawson Radio National: Radio Active; John Laycock Gzowsky = Canada; David Birch Talking Politics: Radio Singapore. Sound Practice: Tom O’Regan Radio Daze: Some Historical & Technological Aspects of Radio; Therese Davis Presence; Gregory Whitehead Pressures of the Unspeakable: A Nervous System for Sydney; Rebecca Coyle Sound and Speed in Convocation: The Listening Room on Virilio; Allen S.Weiss Pressures of the Sun: Manifesto Against the Electric Drug; Martin Harrison Three Works from Memory—‘De-memorize, like the unconscious’. Questions of Film Culture: Noel King Critical Occasions: Making Meaning and Film Criticism; Toby Miller (How) Does Film Theory Work?; Stephen Crofts Cross-cultural Reception: Variant Readings of Crocodile Dundee; Noel King Reconsidering the Film-Politics Relation; Review: Writing Culture/Writing Anthropology. Continuum Volume 5:1 (1991) Contents: Alec McHoul Introduction. 1. Visual Discourse: David Silverman Unfixing the Subject: Viewing Bad Timing; Alec McHoul Taking the Children: Some Reflections at a Distance on the Camera and Dr Barnardo; Niall Lucy My Nerves/My Derrida: On Brunette & Wills’ Screen/Play.

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2. Documentary/Discourse: William Routt The Truth of the Documentary; Theo van Leeuwen Conjunctive Structure in Documentary Film & Television; Carolyn D.Baker Ways of Speaking: The Relation of Talk and Discourse on a Documentary Film Site. 3. New(s)/Journalism/Discourse: Niall Lucy Writing an(d) Experience: Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, Again; Christine Higgins Broadcast News: A Linguistic Mode of Analysis; Lena Jayyusi The Equivocal Text and the Objective World: An Ethnomethodological Analysis of a News Report. 4. Advertising/Consuming/Discourse: Sue Best Foundations of Femininity: Berlei Corsets and the (Un)making of the Modern Body; Peter R. Grahame Finding the Reader: Early Consumer Activism and the Project of Consumer Literacy. Continuum Volume 4:2 (1991) Contents: I. Television and…John Hartley Popular Reality: A (Hair) Brush with Cultural Studies. II. Television and its Audiences: Ien Ang Stalking the Wild Viewer; Catherine Nicholson On ‘Graham Kennedy’s Funniest Home Video Show’; Norm Leslie Desperate Diversions: ‘The Snowy’, the Gulf, and Populism; Paul Attallah Of Homes and Machines: TV, Technology, and Fun in America, 1944–1984. III. Television and its Neighbours: Helen Irving Little Elves and Mind Control: Advertising and its Critics; Tom O’Regan From Piracy to Sovereignty: International Video Cassette Recorder Trends; Krisha Sen Si Boy Looked at Johnny: Indonesian Screen at the Turn of the Decade. IV. Television and its Prehistories: Ann Curthoys Television before Television; Albert Moran Some Beginnings for Australian Television. V. Television and its Subjects: Theo van Leeuwen & Philip Bell Ways of Arguing: A reply to Bruck and Docker; Toby Miller Splitting the Citizen; Gillian Swanson Building the Feminine: Feminist Film Theory and Female Spectatorship; William D.Routt New Lealand Culture; Index Volumes 3 & 4 (1990–1991).

INDEX VOLUME 6

Articles Ien Ang Dismantling ‘cultural studies’ p. x Tony Bennett Useful culture p. 384 Barbara Bradby Like a virgin-mother?: materialism and maternalism in the songs of Madonna p. 73 Dipesh Chakrabarty Provincializing Europe: postcoloniality and the artifice of history p. 324 Kuan-Hsing Chen Voices from the outside: towards a new internationalist localism p. 472 Stuart Cunningham TV violence: the challenge of public policy for Cultural Studies p. 97 Clara Gallini Dangerous games: racism as practised symbolically in Italian popular culture p. Luke Gibbons Identity without a centre: allegory, history and Irish nationalism p. 27 Henry A.Giroux and David Trend Cultural workers, pedagogy and the politics of difference: beyond cultural conservatism p. 51 John Hartley ‘Dismantling’ Fremantle? p. vi —Expatriation: useful astonishment as cultural studies p. 441 Peter Hitchcock The aesthetics of alienation, or China’s ‘Fifth Generation’ p. 116 Rudi Laermans The relative rightness of Pierre Bourdieu: some sociological comments on the legitimacy of

postmodern art, literature and culture p. 248 Angela McRobbie The Passagenwerk and the place of Walter Benjamin in Cultural Studies: Benjamin, Cultural Studies, Marxist theories of art p. 147 Steve Mickler Visions of disorder: media, police, Aboriginal people and the politics of youth crime reporting p. xxi Meaghan Morris Afterthoughts on ‘Australianism’ p. 462 Stephen Muecke Marginality, writing, education p. 261 Cary Nelson Modern poems we have wanted to forget p. 170 Tom O’Regan (Mis)taking policy: notes on the cultural policy debate p. 399 Bill Schwarz England in Europe: reflections on national identity and cultural theory p. 198 Ellen Seiter Toys are us: marketing to children and parents p. 232 David Sholle Authority on the left: critical pedagogy, postmodernism and vital strategies p. 271 Zoë Sofia Hegemonic irrationalities and psychoanalytic cultural critique p. 364 David Tomas From gesture to activity: dislocating the anthropological scriptorium p. 1 Graeme Turner Of rocks and hard places: the colonized, the national and Australian cultural studies p. 414

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McKenzie Wark Speaking trajectories: Meaghan Morris, antipodean theory and Australian cultural studies p. 424

Kites and reviews Pat Kirkham The new look—Fabrications: Costume and the Female Body edited by Jane Gaines and Charlotte Herzog p. 491 Martyn Lee Exploring the symbolic economy—The Work of Pierre Bourdieu by Derek Robbins p. 504 Colin McArthur Glasgow Belongs to Whom? on Ian Spring’s Phantom Village p. 290 Alec McHoul The processed world—Bad Attitude: The Processed World Anthology edited by Chris Carlson with Mark Leger p. 496 Ian Spring City of Quartz, on Mike Davis’s City of Quartz p. 296 Graeme Turner ‘Look Mum, no hands’— the trivial pursuit of textual analysis— Readings in Popular Culture: Trivial Pursuits? edited by Gary Day p. 500

Gary Wickham Sports, manners, persons, government: sport, Elias, Mauss, Foucault p. 219