I think I stumbled onto this thread about two weeks too late. If only I were as articulate as the aforementioned Adam (who doesn’t have a blog). I don’t know what’s wrong with the comments on MY blog, it’s buggered. Bah!

I’ll look out for you at the next event in Brisbania that I’m at. Something CCCS? Zed Marketday?? (they’re always fun!) Can’t see my calendar from here. *peers*

I’m not a stalker, I promise. :/

Anyway, see you around.

- adam m

Thanks for sharing this, although I certainly never claimed that ‘if CS turned their attention to Steve Irwin that somehow fascism might be avoided’! I was making a more general statement about what Williams would call a ‘structure of feeling’ that has emerged during Howard’s time in office. And I hardly agree that blogs are going to provide the role that Benjamin ascribed to Kracauer:

“A ragpicker at daybreak – in the dawn of the day of revolution.”

I am still struggling with the idea that if CS turned their attention to Steve Irwin that somehow fascism might be avoided. It seems to me that material published about “the everyday” in a “cultural studies journal” can only ever be quoted by the culture managers (journos etc.) as an example of how screwed up academics are, unless the academics provide some statistics that can be used by the culture managers to “prove something” or create a new storyline.

Personally, I find it hard to see how CS’ much-needed scandalising of the ruling class academy has really had much of an impact on the processes that create the average Aussie’s emotional response to Steve Irwin and Peter Brock. If I was going to push the argument a little further, I sort of feel like the desire to connect with the “everyday” of media can also be a disavowal of the everyday structural/cultural reproduction within education and the university, where so many housing this desire reside. I know you aren’t unaware of those tensions, and I’m not accusing you of Buffy Studies-ism, but I do think that dynamic exists in Australia (and NZ) a lot because of the national resistance to a language of class and the desperate desire to fit in. So academia uses “popular culture” to guarantee its political potential or relevance with very little proof of this actually happening.

So the question for me is “what is the best thing academics could do in this situation?” I don’t think journal articles are ever going to effect popular culture. Increasingly, I think that it’s by trying to think harder about the institutions we’re in, the histories they have, and to understand how they shape our perspectives and the stories we’re able to tell about “life”, or “culture”. An everyday of our own, attached to a not-everyday of some well-tested theoretical frameworks. A bit more rigor about interrogating what we share, or don’t, and how that affects our shared understanding of what we’re doing in our research and in the classroom.

Unfortunately, despite our different hopes for CS, it seems to me that there is little energy in much of the field toward either. Thankfully, there are blogs!