growing pains

Posted on | September 26, 2004 |

let it be noted that this blog does respond to loyal readers’ requests, hence i will refrain from writing anything about yesterday’s grand final here and will clearly state from now on whether an entry contains football references! instead, i might relate some of the interesting points made in the keynote addresses i heard yesterday at the EMSAH postgraduate conference at UQ. The WIP (work in progress) conference theme was “Bad Ideas” and opening speakers Graeme Turner and Amanda Lohrey were asked to talk about some of the bad ideas they’d had during their careers. Both have had what the audience of postgraduate students would likely consider success in their chosen fields: Graeme a major player in Australian cultural studies with his own research centre, a formidable publishing output and a recent federal grant for the Cultural Research Network; Amanda a highly successful and critically acclaimed novelist who teaches creative writing at UQ (partly, it seems, to support her consuming passion for fiction writing). It was nice that both embraced the invitation to speak - in my experience it’s rare that academics willingly admit to mistakes or potential weaknesses in public! What they had to say I found pretty encouraging, too, especially in light of some fairly annoying examples of intellectual performance i’ve noticed in other fora lately.

For all the problems with the current university environment - and from what could be gleaned from the events I attended during UQ’s ‘Research Week’, there’s plenty - things aren’t all bad. Graeme and Amanda’s anecdotes gave some perspective on developments that can only be welcome in the university, such as:

- the move away from an ‘Oxbridge’ model of sink or swim supervision, where advisors consult with students perhaps twice a year over a glass of sherry, and only more often if the student is attractive;

- the stereotype of university English departments as havens for dysfunctional types, ’some of whom sleep in their offices, and most of whom sleep with students’, is becoming harder to justify (tho we can all name exceptions here…)

- despite the influential perception that cultural studies is a bad idea (Graeme quipped it’s the biggest bad idea he’s stuck with in his career), popular culture is now studied in huge numbers. Not only is this an ongoing affront to the clear class and gender biases of the academy in the past, it’s also testimony to cultural studies’ mobilising idea (in the work of Raymond Williams and Richard Hoggart for instance) that gaining a critical literacy in one’s own culture is a fundamental benefit of a university education.

Amanda used a wonderful phrase, ‘premature coherence’ (in the sense of ‘premature ejaculation’) to describe the pressure on PhD students to jump through so many hoops during their candidature, including the application process, confirmation evaluations and the growing expectation of completion within three years. This is a pressure I felt keenly in a small department, reliant as any other on the funding injection generated by my leaving. But even as a postdoc, ostensibly following the ‘right path’ to a career in academia, I still feel pretty incoherent most of the time!

What was encouraging to hear from both speakers was a sense of conviction about the value of higher education and that hard work can bring about change as well as personal fulfilment. There aren’t too many happy stories thrown around the Humanities in Australia, but I personally think Graeme’s objective is a good one: It’s no good trying to pretend you’re outside the system. It’s more productive to become the system (a comment that reminded me of Ned’s great response to charges of reformism at the Italian Effect conference: “Why do you insist on seeing capitalism as exploiting us, when we have the capacity to exploit it?”).

Anyway, a lot of these issues are linked to what I’m thinking of writing about for our panel on ‘counter-heroics and counter-professionalism in cultural studies’. I’m a bit tired of contemporaries dictating what my politics should be, and increasingly I think I’ll be turning to older colleagues to help contextualise some of the noises around me. The artificial urgencies and the heroic tone of much of what calls itself discussion of contemporary research not only seems like so much wasted breath. Given the few identifiable aims served by it, it is. The longer listserver larrikins keep on coining neologisms and promoting unhelpful generalisations, the more they start sounding like the moralising intellectuals of every generation, and those that critical cultural studies practice in whatever professional home will continue to benefit by ignoring…

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