This means you

8 Responses to “This means you”

1. Glen
   January 6th, 2005 @ 8:43 pm

   Mel,

   This is a very interesting project. I would like to participate, but I don’t feel as if any of my work is ‘public’. What is ‘public’ anyway? I remember reading about someone’s notion of ‘publics’, which is kind of cool, but I find the whole idea of ‘public’ problematic as it fits too easily into some sort of Germanic Habermasian tradition…

   My first problem is the immediate assumption that ‘public intellectual work’ must somehow belong to the ‘media’. Maybe this isn’t a problem in the context of the narrow confines of the question regarding the definition of a ‘public’ (community defined by media/ted power relations). I quike like Grossberg’s focus on what matters (to the ‘public’ conceived of in a material, lived sense - he uses the word ‘affective’, which is probably wrong from the POV of the Thompkins-influenced Cult Studs) as being what matters (to an ‘intellectual’).

   I guess what I am worried about is the difference between publishing for a ‘public’ (imagined community) and engagement (dialogue with a lived collective). I engage mostly with car enthusiasts on websites and forums to do with car stuff around issues that matter to them. My problem probably mirrors some of the issues being raised on the CSAA list at the moment as Cult Studs is meant to have a set of issues (defined in a multitude of ways) that resonate with each other, but certaily not with what I do on car enthusiast forums. Mostly what I do is try to explain the role of the authorities in relation to car enthusiasts. Most car enthusiasts are conservative and attempt to participate in the culture by following all the rules. What they don’t realise is that some sections of the ‘public’ hate car enthusiasts and the ‘rules’ (laws and legislations) are designed to reinforce certain power relations where the enthusiasts are always on the short end of the stick. As someone once said not everyone thinks like a philosopher.

   Anyway, the difference between addressing an imagined community and engaging with a lived collective could be thought in terms of one identifies what _should_ be problems (~problematises) and the other engages directly with the problems that already exist (~problematic). The second set of problems may or may not be ‘real’ problems and this is the crux of what I find troubling I guess with the whole Cult Studs tradition. Whose problems do we engage with? How do we guage which problems are worthy of our attention and, in the same breath, who is worthy of engaging with which problems?

   I don’t want to become a “problematiser for hire” as I can imagine that I would be thinking someone else’s thoughts for them, which is exactly what I don’t want to do.

   Hope you are having an awesome summer!

   Glen.

2. mc gregg
   January 7th, 2005 @ 12:40 pm

   Hey Glen

   Awesome probably ain’t the word for my summer so far, but the highs are definitely matching the lows…

   I think the survey would really benefit from your thoughts - these are exactly the kinds of issues that need to be reflected in the results. I suspect part of the motivation for the study is to show that new generations of researchers have different opinions on these concepts as well as the emphases and the fora for their work.

   On publics and their limits, I think Kris has done the most thinking on this of all of us and may care to share… where are you KC?

3. jean
   January 7th, 2005 @ 12:56 pm

   Yes, might be interesting to play with the idea of car enthusiast communities as “a” (as opposed to “the”) public?

4. Mel
   January 7th, 2005 @ 3:47 pm

   I’ve found the recent CSAA list debate quite depressing because it seems so irrelevant to the kind of CS I’m interested in. And it makes the kind of CS I’m interested in seem so irrelevant.

   I’ve been in a deep funk recently, thinking of how superficial and un-intellectual my ‘work’ is, and how I am some kind of dancing media monkey, a supplier of ‘intellectainment’.

   I’m thinking “I should read more theory and be more macro-political”. I’m thinking “It’s terrible of me to find meaning in disposable consumerism and smutty pop music when I should be delving into the deep issues.” But I tried to do that with my MA thesis and it made me extremely bored and rageful. And it’s there on paper that I am not very good at it. Maybe I should just accept my own limitations and leave the smart stuff to your good selves.

5. josh
   January 7th, 2005 @ 4:36 pm

   It’s so funny to hear someone else say those things Mel. Funny because despite the fact I said these things about myself last night, my first impulse was to assure you your work is not ‘intellectainment’ (though I love totally *heart* that word) nor irrelevant and to suggest the lofty debate on the list at the moment is self-serving and self-aggrandising (though this assessment I pinched from mc gregg herself).

   I have long felt left out and in the cold because of my inability or lack of desire to participate in the sorts of debates that are currently being batted around on the list. For me the sense that I should “leave the smart stuff” to others was a contributing factor to two years of existential angst driven depression and an unfinished PhD thesis (it’s coming though mind you, bloody soon). However I think that these sorts of debates serve to highlight not that people such as yourself don’t have a place in CS but that CS is more than and not necessarily concerned with, solely about, driven by or dependent upon the macro-political and high-theory mindset present in such a debate. I have found particular solace in Liz Jacka’s response. It’s not so much that there is no place for those who don’t wish to be a part of these debates but conversely that these debates demonstrate the spaces and importance of knowledge creation that may not be concerned with or described by the sorts of speaking positions Terry’s proposition has drawn for consideration (though I’m not sure this was his intention, but that’s a whole other thought).

   I think there is a related question here about public intellectualism that I would like to take up but need to think a little more about first. For the moment however I would like to say that I agree with Jean’s suggestion a reconfiguration of Glen’s formulation of car enthusiasts as ‘a’ public though I wonder whether the fundamental problem you’re facing Glen is not what way to reconcile knowledge produced in and for different communities or publics but rather what place your own knowledge production fits into. I think it is fair to fold your assessment of conservatism within car enthusiasts because they follow the rules back onto Cultural Studies, and that seems to me to part of the debate that is being had there and here. If anything I think your argument there is a set of problems that are not ‘real’ only serves to perpetuate your confusion about where your work stands. Perhaps the answer is not in the problems but the approach?

6. Glen
   January 7th, 2005 @ 4:36 pm

   Hey Mel, firstly, read my post from last night (this morning) on my blog. I sort of take your argument to the limit finding inspiration from smutty movies, haha. Love that word. Smut. It is odd we would both respond in similar ways.

   Secondly, inspired by some Phillip K. Dick, I am going to describe CS through “The Simile of Dreaming Sheep” from now on: I have often wondered if a nihilist dreams the sheep mean something. Then I wonder whether or not it mattered to the sheep. Lastly, I wonder whether or not it mattered to the rest of the world as the sheep were an invention of the nihilist’s mind.

7. Glen
   January 7th, 2005 @ 7:41 pm

   Posted at the same time. Sheezus! I need to go to an ‘approach mechanic’ and I am beginning to realise that existential angst and CS PhDs are par for course, which makes me feel better. Chilean urban cultural studies journals is where my knowledge production belongs apparently… I reckon this is just my way of giving myself some sort of demented, highly convoluted pep-talk so I attack my thesis and finish on time.

8. Christian McCrea
   January 8th, 2005 @ 10:51 pm

   Academic aggression on places like CSAA and Fiberculture, and maybe moreso the group of macho boys in English departments make it *very* hard to think that anything less than full-throttle Bataille-n-Negri machismo is worthy theory.

   But those types of theorists that rubbish pop culture CS have the worry that their work isn’t culturally relevant, their finger up their arses, far away from the pulse.

   “It’s terrible of me to find meaning in disposable consumerism and smutty pop music when I should be delving into the deep issues.”

   Mel, if its any consolation, good theory on disposable consumerism and smutty pop music is more fun to read, and certainly more intellectually stimulating - so *I’d* like to see more of it made. We still live in conservative times, and while I adore reading Agamben et al, you’re not going to swing anybody’s opinion on detention centres with a monograph on Italian philosophers. Macro-politics is a luxury, anyway, fuck ‘em.

   Good theory, good debate is useful no matter what. And there’s nothing to say you can’t move from style to style. Barthes did okay.