On being an ordinary Australian
Posted on | March 12, 2006 |
It may be 10 years since John Howard became Prime Minister of Australia, but this year also marks 10 years since I started - and never left - university. In response to the commitments I’ve already lined up for the rest of the year, I’ve decided to use this experience as some kind of organising basis for the paper I’m writing for the Richard Hoggart conference in a few weeks, and I also want it to be the first version of the paper I’ll hopefully give at ‘UnAustralia’: the Cultural Studies Association of Australasia annual conference in Canberra this December. In essence, it’s a critique of ‘ordinariness’ - not only as an idealised concept in cultural studies but (in light of Howard’s example) as a legitimate position upon which to claim political leadership. Not that original, I know, but bear with me.
It’s Richard Hoggart’s work that draws cultural studies’ attention to ordinariness as ‘a positive civic goal’, as John Hartley argues. Hoggart’s writing about the English working class shared a similar ethic to Raymond Williams, who claimed at around the same time that ‘culture is ordinary’, something that is intrinsic to all classes, and not the possession of a privileged few. But what I find increasingly dissatisfying about ordinariness, precisely when it is seen as a civic goal, is the consequences of its implicit flipside, i.e. the extraordinary, or the ’special’. This makes it easy to dismiss anyone who isn’t ordinary as asking for ’special treatment’, as Hansonites, and now Howardites, describe any claims for Indigenous rights (if aboriginal communities do not conform to what white Australia deems ‘ordinary’, which is now only ever neo-liberal economic independence, they are dysfunctional, subject to interventionist discipline tactics, or more likely, complete abandonment). Judith Brett’s history of the Liberal Party is particularly good at describing how successfully Howard has made Labor the party of special interests.
As Frances Bonner’s latest work shows, it’s possible for some figures to inhabit the role of being both ordinary and extraordinary - celebrities are the key example she discusses. But in adopting the same strategy, Howard obscures his extraordinary privilege and legislative power while estranging any other voices apart from the white, heterosexual, and usually male working adult. It’s not uncommon to hear this kind of reading, but what I’m interested in doing is offering a personalised account of this kind of estrangement, talking about the politics and life experiences I’ve encountered over this period to show what’s ordinary to me. It’s not ground-breaking, it might even be indulgent, but it’s an attempt to refuse the political categories assigned to people like me* by both the Left and Right wing commentariat - people that do not exist in the dominant media commentary of Howard’s 10 years, that’s for sure. But you know what? I think there’s a real problem when political leadership can’t be imagined as something that wouldn’t make a country’s young people feel constantly ashamed of their education and disqualified from the public sphere because of it. (Incidentally, it’s the 10 year anniversary of Bob Brown entering parliament too, but you’re certainly not ‘ordinary’ if you think some of his ideas - like conserving natural resources for future generations, like having an agenda in addition to economics - make sense.)
So if you feel like it, can you help me think this through a bit more? Leave a comment reflecting on your experience of the past 10 years. Not in the terms that the broadsheets have been dictating - not on a timeline that Howard’s ‘losses’ or ‘victories’ enshrine as The Political Narrative of our last decade - but in your words, and for issues you care about. How have the past 10 years of Liberal Government affected you? What have your politics been about over this time? How have you been made to feel like you aren’t an ordinary Australian? And what are the issues still missing from public debate in this country?
* white, feminist, queer, post-structuralism trained, urban based, apartment living, non-procreating, professional academic
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12 Responses to “On being an ordinary Australian”
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March 13th, 2006 @ 7:47 am
Hey Mel, good luck, my only suggestion would be that a comparative reading against developments in related nation-states is important. Specifically UK&US whose mechanisms for producing the media citizen essentially define the genre for Aus. Some of the ordinariness is local, but some is also produced as part of transnational cultural/capital flows, and to get a handle on what can be changed from Australia it will be useful to know which is which. The rise of race issues/immigration and fathers’ rights as moral panics have also occurred in NZ under a Labor govt.
My gut feeling is that the Australian left is altogether much happier locating the source of trouble in Howard, rather than these broader processes (that are as you know the stock-in-trade of cultural studies). Personally, I increasingly sense that the “Australian values” I thought I grew up in (official multiculturalism and a fair go) were a two-decade policy aberration from a more deeply rooted racism that never really went away.
March 13th, 2006 @ 7:25 pm
I have grown up, in more ways than one, with neo-liberalism.
Every other form of society or mode of government is someone else’s memory or an exotic figment of some other place. All I see as the contents of neoliberalism is the most superficial of politics organised around the maintenance of the most up-to-date technocratic social regime. It appears as if the problem for the current Federal government is the extension and intensity of Australia’s engagement with the rest of the world. Best relationship EVA with the US! Did you see the bumper sticker on Howard’s limo: China is tip-top! For the states it is the losing battle to maintain basic services. Differences — race, ethnicity, class, age, culture — are organised in such a manner to keep the machine working; no one ever seems to ask if the machine should keep working.
Politicians seem to be even less than administrators, now they appear to be mere functionaries of the global markets, of reactionary desire, and of the mass-individuation of a selfish preoccupation with one’s own welfare. The smugness of the current regime is sickening. They are smug in the knowledge that they are the most efficient assistants in history.
Lindsay Tanner said some very smart things a short while ago about the position of the Australian ‘State’ in relation to citizens. By producing a generation trapped in debt and entertained by cultural stupidies the neoliberal governments (state and federal, beginning with Keating) have coalesced a population so it is an echo of neoliberal concerns.
None of the real problems of this era, including issues of mental health, are *ever* addressed. Even when the WA State premier resigned citing mental health problems, no political action was taken or even thought about. This episode was quickly forgotten in the mass media. One ad running I remember said “Don’t see the problem, see the person.” Might seem like a genuine advertisement, but it is also classic neoliberal rhetoric. It is the person that is visible, not the social and material context in which they are found.
Anyway, in this context, I would think of Lefebvre’s sense of the ‘everyday’ but rethought for neoliberal times. What is the ‘everyday’ that circulates as the dominant ‘whole way of life’ that remains when one has elimated all ’specialised activities’ now? The chief trick is the production of specialised activities, beliefs, desires, etc not recognised as such and which are, in fact, acted upon and assumed as if they were universal. How is the sense of common sense produced? Media trajectories and so on that Danny points to?
Like, has anyone noticed, in passing perhaps, that Funniest Home Videos, the show that highlights the comedy of the everyday tragedy, gets most of its **funny** content from outside of Australia? Old woman falling off her chair!! Again! Kicked in the nuts!! Again! ahahaha, who voted for john howard…? Again! ahahahaaha!!!!!!!111oneone That should be on Funniest Home Videos.
The reactionary desires that organise the selection of differences that matter and the utter stupidity of current conceptions of news worthiness that produce nightly current affairs programs is probably a good indicator, too. Who needs to see the latest incarnation of the dole bludger? Seriously? Is that to make late-twenty/early-thirty something dimwits content with their lot?
Yeah, I could write forever…
March 13th, 2006 @ 7:28 pm
stupidies should read stupidities… ha!
March 13th, 2006 @ 8:09 pm
Gosh, I can’t even conceive of writing that many words at once right now. (Glen!!!!) I take all your points, Mel, definitely. I will also say that there is a difference between the idea of ordinariness as homogenous normativity (so, not ‘wrong’), and the ordinary as the reverse of the ‘exceptional’ or ’special’. Same referent, 2 different antonyms. As you know, I sometimes use ‘ordinary’ more or less synonomously with ‘non-elite’, because in this age of discriminating omnivorousness as the key marker of cultural capital, ‘good’ difference is often articulated with the cultural competence to *perform* it culturally, in aesthetically pleasing or demonstratively self-aware ways. That’s what I get from Williams, actually.
Keeping an eye on that, I’m passionate about the *specificity* of ordinariness, and ordinary dignity. I believe in the representation of ordinary difference as a way to ‘lower the barriers to empathy’, to quote myself (I think).
And 10 years of Howardian Rule…my god. I’ll sum up by saying that I remember feeling in the 1990s like I was never extraordinary enough for my life to add up to anything; and now to feeling like too different for words, in many ways.
March 14th, 2006 @ 11:01 am
oh, oh, just cause I saw it last night, and I thought of your thing, and maybe you might need a popular culture ‘hook’ like every good cultstud essay should have, if you haven’t already thought of it already: “We could be heroes”
Is it australia’s equivalent of little britain? but organised around the ’sport’ of Aussie of the year? It has everything from plasma TV’s to eating disorders to reactionary-masculine teenage boys…
March 15th, 2006 @ 8:58 am
Thanks guys. Glen, I’m kinda following your suggestion about re-reading the theory in light of neoliberalism, but the example is more specific. I don’t want to conflate studies of the ‘everyday’ with studies of the ‘ordinary’ - they each have rich histories, and enough complicated nuances that Jean notes. So all I’m planning to do for the Hoggart paper is contemplate what a politics based on ordinariness means at a time when a powerful figure stakes his legitimacy relying on that trope.
Jean - the problem I’m having, or at least that I’m trying to point out, is that I’m not sure it’s possible to differentiate what you want ordinary to do from what Howard uses it to do. You both have a problem with pretension, which is a singularly ‘Australian’ disposition, and one I share as well. But what I need help to argue is that Howard combines both of the sense of ordinary that you point out, when only the latter (which seeks to encourage empathy despite incommensurate differences, which does not impose a norm) carries an ethics I’m happy with. Do you see what I mean?
Why I wanted to write about my own experience was precisely to lower the barriers for empathy, to show how I feel alienated by the way I am represented as an elite! But the irony is that I’ll be giving this paper to a room of English literary critics, where I am the only woman under 40… eeeek
March 15th, 2006 @ 9:00 am
PS. Jean are you quoting yourself or me?!! I get v confused these days!
March 15th, 2006 @ 12:51 pm
Yeah, I do get this Mel - I regularly shout with great venom things like “who the f**k do you think is f***ing *ordinary*?’ (which means, of course, ‘normal’). I don’t want to be, or anyone else to be, his kind of ordinary. And you’re right, me wanting CS to ‘hear ordinary voices’ could sound just like an appeal from Hanson, forget Howard.
But to take up your finer points, I’m not sure Howard et al *do* get the idea of ordinary specifity - for them, the ordinary is a generality as far as I can see. And for them, difference exists outside, not within the ordinary. Did you say the banner on Howard’s podium at his 10-year dinner bash? It said, “Strong Direction, Mainstream Values”.
My utopian idea about lowering the barriers to empathy is about the inter-communication of universally ordinary, specific difference. I do not thing that it is necessary under those conditions to see difference as incommensurate. One other thing this does, at least theoretically, is help us to recognise when we are making assumptions about sameness or difference *across* macro-social demographics, too.
Actually, that’s why I love “we could be heroes” too. How ‘weird’ those ordinary Australians are, and at the same time how dodgy the construction of them as ‘extraordinary’ is.
As an aside, in doing the latest round of the KGUV Sharing Stories workshops, I’ve been humbled and surprised by the ferocity with which some of Howard’s Australians (50-90 year old white, patriotic, ex-servicemen and women, who have bad things to say about the ‘japs’ in WWII, and all the rest of it) wanted me to know that they reject both narrow parochialism and Howard’s policies on, say, asylum seekers and Iraq.
PS I hope it’s me, because i’ve now published that phrase in Continuum without quotation marks…unless i’m quoting something you said to me in the pub once
Let’s solve it once and for all so i/we can stop plagiarising each other!
March 15th, 2006 @ 1:49 pm
I say something really similar in my chapter (and article) on Hoggart’s ‘discourse of empathy’. You’ll see WHEN YOU READ MY BOOK, heh heh. Oh dear but I read that chapter myself the other day and there are some very embarrassing typos… Anyway, I also use convivial all the time now & I think you started that, so we’re even. Or we’re turning in to Deleuze and Guattari - promoting the same abstract ‘position’ that no outsider can differentiate between. That would be kinda cool!!!
March 16th, 2006 @ 1:20 pm
Kinda cool yes … but with all due respect ‘Gregg & Burgess’ lacks a certain Francophone cache/linguistic coolness. And what’s more, if you Google that (minus the ampersand) you might be confused with an architect … or what’s worse, a lawyer (except I’m not sure which of those two is worse).
March 16th, 2006 @ 5:51 pm
hmmm….what about “burgess & gregg” then? sorry, mel, you have to be 2nd banana. And Google will just have to learn…
PS I think Illich has convivial all wrapped up…
March 22nd, 2006 @ 11:01 am
[...] anddaughter’s daily photographic practice. Heaps more at the department of me, where the dignity of ordinary specificity is eve [...]