Post solidarity (?)

Posted on | November 20, 2005 | 33 Comments

[Cross-posted at Memes of Production]

There’s enough dissing of cultural studies in the blogosphere to make me want to get therapy. Seriously: if anyone has reason to hate cultural studies, it’s me. It stole my social life. It made me move state twice. It pushes me to work the longest hours. And it’s making me blinder every year. But I don’t blame it. It’s not even a thing. I’d like to know what cultural studies ever promised – as if ‘it’ could, as if ‘it’ has enough coherence in any regional let alone national context to be accountable to any of the charges people persist in levelling at ‘it’ – that makes people so pissed off, aggressive or disappointed.

If expectant mums can have support groups to break the isolation of having a baby, can I start one to deal with being a blogger and writing a book about cultural studies? It could be just like a mothers’ group. We could meet at the local community centre and do stretching exercises and learn how to breathe under pain and stress… we could take walks in the park and sit on benches talking through each tiny trauma that’s developed since we last met which could affect the health of the baby. We could cook meals for each other so that we felt cared for; we could make phone calls in the afternoon to help with the constant doubts. We could even go out together on Friday and Saturday nights so we didn’t feel so pathetic and lonely – and go home kinda earlyish without having to make up excuses about why. We would understand each other, because we would know what the other is going through.

Imagine that. Imagine wanting to empathise with someone. Imagine wanting to hear someone say something positive. Imagine thinking that solidarity in writing and intellectual life and, you know, life generally, might be possible. I do all the time. I wish I didn’t have to. Oh – but maybe it’s why I spend so much time reading cultural studies?

Category: Academia, Web studies

Comments

33 Responses to “Post solidarity (?)”

  1. Glen
    November 20th, 2005 @ 9:36 pm

    Which posts in the blogosphere, mel?

  2. melgregg
    November 21st, 2005 @ 10:10 am

    Well, in the past week…

  3. Nick Caldwell
    November 21st, 2005 @ 11:05 am

    The irony is, of course, that pretty much any theorised work in the humanities gets painted with the same brush by the Neanderthal right — Posthegemonic Jon’s anti-cs theoretical work is just as much effete leftwing garbage as the wildest cult stud.

  4. Glen
    November 21st, 2005 @ 12:05 pm

    I wish I was a wild cult stud.

  5. Jon
    November 21st, 2005 @ 12:42 pm

    I’m sure that there are plenty who think what I am doing is “effete leftwing garbage.” I don’t think that’s particularly ironic, though. It’s not that I am trying to appeal to “the Neanderthal right.”

    On the other hand, I’m not too sure what to make of your final paragraph, Mel. I don’t think that anyone has a monopoly on empathy, positivity, or solidarity. (FWIW, though, I do think there are problems with the solidarity model.)

    And if you look through Posthegemonic Musings you’ll see that I’m trying to do rather more than simply dissing Cultural Studies.

  6. Nick Caldwell
    November 21st, 2005 @ 1:09 pm

    Glen, anyone can be a wild cult stud if they just study hard enough.

    Jon, it’s that standard leftist irony of territorial pissing matches between disciplines or political positions that are utterly indistinguishable to outsiders. Most of the time I think we’re our own worst enemies, expending vast amounts of energy in pointless in-fighting when we should be directing our critique outwards.

  7. Jon
    November 21st, 2005 @ 1:44 pm

    Again, Nick, I’m surprised if you’re characterizing what I’m doing above all as “pointless in-fighting.”

    Anyhow, more here.

  8. Posthegemonic Musings
    November 21st, 2005 @ 2:11 pm

    solidarity

    Over on home cooked theory, with an entry entitled “Post Solidarity?” Mel Gregg is, I feel, a mite defensive about Cultural Studies. Admittedly, judging by this news (and the ensuing discussion), Australian academics have some cause to be touchy thes…

  9. Nick Caldwell
    November 21st, 2005 @ 3:43 pm

    Jon, I’m not meaning to point fingers specifically your way.

  10. s0metim3s
    November 21st, 2005 @ 4:13 pm

    Dorothy Dixers and accusation of ‘effete leftwing garbage’. This is what one should be in solidarity with?

  11. Az
    November 21st, 2005 @ 4:59 pm

    But what is ‘solidarity’ in writing and in life? What would it involve, aside from support groups? What’s the political content of ‘life’, per se? Or ‘writing’? I know the above was partially written in jest, but I’m not trying to get all vague and philosophical here, I’m quite serious.

    I think you miss the point when you characterise critiques of CS as pissed off, aggressive etc. You dodge an opportunity to engage with the political content of those critiques. Me, I’m torn between wanting to acknowledge that CS as a ‘thing’ doesn’t exist; and at the same time, seeing that some of the institutional effects of its circulation as a name and a discipline are really fucked up, politically. The thing with CS that differentiates it from sociology or anthropology or philosophy, however (equally, if not more fucked up institutionalised disciplines) is that CS somehow induces a bizarre identification process whereby the identifer assumes that because it’s ‘CS’, it must have political merit. And, following on from that, it must be the precursor to some kind of political movement in which ‘solidarity’ can proceed. As far as I can work out, 70% of cultural studies academics, postgrads etc are, and always have been, wankers who only care about fame or cultural capital. The remaining 30% tend to perform an odd disidentification strategy which makes it possible, in a given place/time, to do the work they want to do, because it’s convenient or the only alternative. That 30% would probably find somewhere else to work, academically or elsewhere, if CS really died. What solidarity can happen in that environment?

  12. Glen
    November 21st, 2005 @ 5:43 pm

    Isn’t CS an accident for anyone who is/has been doing it? I am happy to admit that I accidently started doing cultural studies at Curtin because I went there after I heard they had a sweet writing program (both creative and vocational) after giving up on maths and bollocks at another uni. I didn’t even ‘get’ it until halfway through second year. Accident! Forcing someone to admit they ‘chose’ cultstuds is interpellating them into the consumerist logic of the neoliberalist workplace: workchoices? What choices? Pffft! I am thinking of a centripetal model of collectivity. Choice, bro.

    AZ, aren’t there going to be 70% wankers in anything? This has been really doing my head in lately as I have been starting to understand Neitzsche’s ‘herd’ critique and its full ramifications. What is the choice for most mediocre wild cult studs like moi? The impossibility of superstar cult(stud)dom or die? There has to be a third option – the herd, or what I call the therd space…

    oooooh weeeeee oooooooh weeeeee (X-Files music…)

    Or at least the 30 percenters try not to look down upon us 70 percenters too much; please, be gentle.

    There is also the snot-so-subtle point of the affects of critique (aggressive, gentle, blah blah, bored!!). Humour has a role to play here [cough]…

    Lastly, and perhaps dangerously, isn’t it important to accept or at least be aware of accepting some measure of neoliberal workplace enterprise, as Ien Ang argued to some degree last year in Perth: to maintain an institutional presence and some autonomy from state mechanisms? Follow the crack, but don’t allow yourself to be subsumed by it. Michael Goddard’s lead essay in the most recent Pli discusses some conceptually relevant stuff, I reckon!

    http://www.warwick.ac.uk/philosophy/pli_journal/vol_16.html

    hmmm, perhaps I have become a zizek framing silly points as rhetorical questions?

  13. Nick Caldwell
    November 21st, 2005 @ 7:19 pm

    “s0metim3s”, of course, has to misread me pretty tendentiously to suggest that I’m accusing anyone of doing ‘effete leftwing garbage.’ I’d like an apology, frankly.

  14. melgregg
    November 21st, 2005 @ 7:32 pm

    Ange, what do you mean by Dorothy Dixers? Az, thanks. I find it funny to hear you say I’m dodging an opportunity to engage with the political content of the critiques, because I don’t want to dodge it, I just feel unable to engage with it when cultural studies is described as lame, or people make claims about it I don’t understand or recognise (when I’m writing a book about it! It makes me panic!), or when one of my most important mentors is dismissed as some kind of evil scurge on the quality of scholarship in our universities… It makes me feel really crap and isolated. In those contexts it doesn’t sound like there is an opportunity to talk about politics. I just don’t feel welcome, not the least because I don’t think that cultural studies has intrinsic political merit. I think good scholarship should be able to identify and discuss specific ways in which cultural studies is political, if it is, in what sense and for whom. So if I had an opportunity to engage, I’m not sure I would want to in order to have a political argument about something I know a fair bit about, as Glen says, mostly by accident. I want to write about politics, and I want to write about cultural studies’ relationship to politics, but that shouldn’t mean as a person I identify with the position that cultural studies is political, does it? I don’t know. I mostly worry that an emphasis on cultural studies’ politics seems to gets in the way of an accurate conversation of the diverse amount of work that takes place under its banner now, and has done in the past, in really varied institutional and political conditions – something you pointed out in your blog post, I think.

  15. Josh
    November 21st, 2005 @ 7:44 pm

    Surely if Mel could be arsed organising Dorothy Dixers she’d sort out better ones than these. Did you just blow in to be cynical, s0metim3s?

  16. Glen
    November 21st, 2005 @ 10:05 pm

    C0nsp1racy!

  17. s0metim3s
    November 21st, 2005 @ 10:51 pm

    Is it cynical to ask what one should be in solidarity with? Anyway, it should be kind of obvious that I blew in on the back of a ping.

    Mel’s reluctance to initially specify which posts she was referring to, and Glen’s question (which I’m inclined to think was not a question he didn’t know the answer to given the logs, so much as encouraging Mel to be more forthcoming) does have the structure of a Dorothy Dixer to it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorothy_Dix What that’s a result of is another matter, and likely a combination of things.

    As for apologies and tendentious readings. Honestly Nick, it wasn’t clear, particularly since “not pointing the finger specifically your way” doesn’t quite mean “I was being ironic and don’t believe such a characterisation”. If you were and don’t, I apologise.

    And, Mel, lame means crippled, right? Fear cripples. People scared of losing their jobs is not conducive. It depoliticises and creates situations in which conflicts are either strenuously avoided or deemed to be impolite, which is much the same thing.

    And, here, this is why I disagree with you when you say that “an emphasis on cultural studies’ politics seems to gets in the way of an accurate conversation of the diverse amount of work that takes place under its banner”. Because as diverse as those labours are, that labour still happens under conditions which can be specified, as a discipline, in universities, existing in a labour market that is increasingly precarious. That this encourages certain ways of being, relating to others, the ways in which one sees oneself is, I think, undeniable.

    There is a nexus between “the diverse amount of work” and “cultural studies’ politics”, and it’s not ‘out there’. It’s in, as Foucault would say, one’s soul.

  18. clif
    November 22nd, 2005 @ 6:02 am

    but i do not have a soul! damned legacy of sartre’s Nausea.

    i proudly declare that i do Cultural Studies and don’t give a flying f”#¤ that many don’t like it. if ya don’t, don’t f¤%&// read it. as for being a discipline … whateva (insert rolling eyes) … (no, not your own, that would hurt hehe)

    simple really. i don’t do it for many others. just a couple of mates and community groups who don’t study but DO like to chat about certain issues AND keep me grounded. but then my political aims are micro …

  19. clif
    November 22nd, 2005 @ 7:48 am

    i take that back. what i just wrote is bullshit, hypocritical, and self-indulgent.

    i do care that people might not think concepts and work coming out of CS relevant and might not like it.

    but it’s up to me to make it relevant and them care. it’s not some inherent part of CS or the humanities …

    i don’t think there is a need for a CS mothers group. but just a support group per se maybe. But it is up to us to make it so others can, and feel like they would like to, support us.

    (But as for being a discipline, not really concerned for some reason … more concerend about certain ideas and interesting work per se being lost)

  20. Glen
    November 22nd, 2005 @ 8:31 am

    ‘the answer’! I knew ‘the’ answer? ‘An answer’ maybe. (Are you sure you’re not some sort of pomo Maoist?) The blogosphere is a big place and there is potentially lots of regressive and reactionary hatin’ going around, such is the nature of the inthenet. My original question was genuine.

  21. Jon
    November 22nd, 2005 @ 8:56 am

    Glen, I’m gonna take more umbrage if it’s suggested that the only possible critiques of cultural studies are “regressive and reactionary hatin’” and still more if it’s suggested that Mel’s four links were read as equally examples of such “hatin’.”

    But to put it simply: I think that such yoking together of (to use the phrases provided by Nick) the “effete left” and the “Neanderthal right” is not an encouraging sign. At worst, it’s a smear.

    Look, I’m not going to get too “touchy” (to use one of my terms) about this. But while I am willing to believe that there are good intentions at work, I do find this little discussion rather surprising.

  22. Glen
    November 22nd, 2005 @ 9:50 am

    jon, there is plenty of hatin’ in the blogosphere and I think you are being a bit touchy! I enjoyed your critique and somewhat agree with you (i have been writing about similar issues on my blog, you know!!). I am looking forward to your book.

    So, I don’t mean navel gazing debates of the type that gets clif riled up or genuine critiques. What I was referring to was the negative sentiment the fans flame wars, etc. and overtly contrarian positions where people seem to be entirely disingenuous in their motives. I really didn’t know which blog posts to which Mel was referring, even though I had already read these posts. Sorry, no umbrage intended.

  23. Nick Caldwell
    November 22nd, 2005 @ 10:17 am

    Oh for heaven’s sake. I won’t defend my original post as a model of clarity but it’s tolerably obvious that I was trying to characterise the prejudices _OF_ the Neanderthal right rather than insult the output of knowledge workers in the humanities.

  24. Az
    November 22nd, 2005 @ 10:32 am

    Forcing someone to admit they ‘chose’ cultstuds is interpellating them into the consumerist logic of the neoliberalist workplace: workchoices?

    I’m not talking about ‘choice’ here, I’m trying to explore the possibility that even accidents have effects/patterns. That could be interrogated, given a chance, quite productively.

    Mel wrote:

    I just feel unable to engage with it when cultural studies is described as lame, or people make claims about it I don’t understand or recognise (when I’m writing a book about it! It makes me panic!), or when one of my most important mentors is dismissed as some kind of evil scurge on the quality of scholarship in our universities… It makes me feel really crap and isolated. In those contexts it doesn’t sound like there is an opportunity to talk about politics. I just don’t feel welcome…

    Well, I can understand that it would make you panic. But can’t panic be productive? Doesn’t it mean a chance to explore new ground, in a weird way? Doesn’t misrecognition signal that something different is happening from what you first thought?

    And I’m not sure who you’re talking about re mentor — but my own comments about particular theorists are based on what I’ve read and what I really think, not the desire to be a hater.

    And this last thing is going to sound pretty ‘angry’, so bear in mind that I’m really not, but for god’s sake, cultural studies people need support groups so they can feel okay about having the time and privilege to read Morris, Bennett, Grossberg, Stuart Hall or any other theorist? The only way I square the privileges I have as a postgrad with a knowledge of how fucked it is for most people out there in the real world, in so many ways, is a sense that I’m trying to make my work count for something, politically, and trying to do some other political stuff with the resources of my scholarship, access to university ‘facilities’ etc. Sometimes I don’t feel like I manage that very well. But hey, I’m trying — in the knowledge that this probably won’t get me a job, or if it does, it’ll be a job I have to re-apply for every six months, etc, and that any ARC grant I apply for will get vetoed automatically as ‘peek in the pants’ work. (Andrew Bolt, you poet.) That’s if I manage to finish my thesis. I’m in CS because it allows me to do work I would have difficulty piecing together elsewhere, and because that’s where I have found someone amazing and inspiring to help me do it. I am being openly strategic, a bit, about careeer stuff now because I would really like to get paid sometime to do this stuff. But I would last about 2 minutes in a hypothetical CS support group, because I would get so frustrated with the unconscious privilege assumed by the participants that I’d start frothing at the mouth. Support and soldarity, my ears and whiskers!

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  27. Miles
    November 23rd, 2005 @ 11:04 am

    I thought cultural studies was about yoghurt….

    *ducks*

  28. Nick Caldwell
    November 23rd, 2005 @ 2:34 pm

    Miles, that’s “culture studies”. Do try to keep up, old chap.

  29. Mel
    November 23rd, 2005 @ 5:13 pm

    This is quite a clever blog title, because what I find fascinating about Mel’s blogging is her regular recourses to structures of femininity. As such I find her desire for a CS ‘mum’s group’ quite seductive because it makes an analogy between the ‘devalued’ work of CS practitioners and the ‘devalued’ work of mums. I think the key thing is that this ‘solidarity’ is not disciplinary or institutionalised, but informal and ‘domestic’.

    I interpreted Mel’s post as simply wanting validation for the work she does, and as such I saw Az’s last ‘angry’ comment as the most interesting because of its talk of privilege. It’s an important point. But what if this were not a group that assumed privilege, but a group that assumed pragmatism? Like the young mums in Mel’s example who take care of each other?

    If I had a band, I might called it The Peeks in the Pants. Makes for a good pun, too. Bolt is a genius poet indeed.

  30. melgregg
    November 24th, 2005 @ 8:55 pm

    Mel, thanks for noticing, I didn’t think anyone had :)

  31. Laura
    November 29th, 2005 @ 9:10 am

    Just thinking aloud here. Institutionalised solidarity isn’t all bad — informal collectives aren’t all good — the latter can and do devolve into cliques in ways that the former can’t. As in, everyone has to go to the department meeting but only the cool mums get invited to coffee.

  32. Mel
    November 29th, 2005 @ 3:28 pm

    Just being the devil’s advocate:what if cliquiness is the known and agreed logic of informal collectives, whereas it operates invisibly as the subtext of institutional ‘solidarity’? As in, everyone has to go to the department meeting but only the cool academics get invited to the pub afterwards.

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