Cultural studies after Melbourne

Posted on | August 21, 2008 | No Comments

Last week on top of the excitement of meeting Lauren Berlant and Ian Horswill and the despair of seeing the Swans lose at ANZ stadium I had some interesting discussions about teaching and cultural studies with some of Melbourne University’s finest employees. It was exciting to hear that some of the material I’ve discussed here previously is finding its way on to courses there and that students seem to be responding to it in ways that can’t be said for more ‘traditional’ cultural studies fare like subcultural theory or consumption and globalisation. I guess it’s always going to be difficult to translate the class politics of pre-Thatcherite Britain to ivy league-ish kids in inner-city Melbourne, so it’s good that there are new themes and resources emerging that speak more directly to contemporary experience.

In contrast to the optimism I gleaned from the sessional staff however, other more senior academics I met were surprisingly prepared to opine about the demise of cultural studies given its coteries of back-scratching mates and name-dropping stars. Granted this person didn’t realise until afterwards that I had written a book about cultural studies and that I serve on the ACS Board! But to hear such a take on what had gone wrong with the field shows that there have been and continue to be stakes around its formation – and that there is still significant ill-feeling about the “hegemonic” shape it has taken.

All of these issues are forefront in my mind right now as I look forward to our visiting scholar, Meaghan Morris, delivering her lecture for us in the Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies tonight. The title, Twenty Years of Banality in Cultural Studies: A Research Problem, is typically provocative, and appears to bear the hallmarks of Morris’s signature use of anecdote to present potentials for empirical innovation.

It has me thinking about all the students who have taken cultural studies courses in the last 20 years, and where they are now. UQ is currently enjoying a mini-renaissance of cultural studies figureheads who were active contributors to the field’s public debates early on (Meaghan Morris and Simon During currently join Tom O’Regan, Ian Hunter and Graeme Turner at seminars and coffee shops around the place, and Toby Miller is a regular visitor). But who are the scholars lining up to continue their work? What do they study or work on now? How many are even in the university sector? And is their work recognisable as cultural studies?

These questions are deliberately rhetorical (I have my own answers!). However, they anticipate some further provocations that will be raised here in forthcoming weeks in preparation for the State of the Industry conference I’m organising with Emily Potter and Clif Evers.

They are also issues I’m dealing with having just sent off some writing samples for a job application – a process which, along with the possibility of an interview, is forcing me to articulate how I see the link between my PhD and my current research.

The writing I sent seems old to me now, even though it is where I express my strongest arguments about cultural studies. It’s where I try to explain what it means for the current generation of graduates who grew up with cultural studies on a syllabus to invest in the academic vocation. Another piece describes the particular contribution Meaghan’s feminist and Australian voice has brought to intellectual debate internationally.

In this vision I don’t see cultural studies as political if this means adopting the appropriate attitude to the various formations defining the field’s lifespan: Thatcher, Reagan, Howard, Bush, Blair… neoliberalism. Rather, as Lauren Berlant described her own project last week, I think cultural studies offers a set of tools to write ‘a history of the present’ for the cultures in which we live. I think Ken Wark has a similar idea in his claim that journalism is the first draft of history; cultural studies is the second. Both are important interventions in defining what counts as important in the present and future, and in this way both have political potential. (I’m not sure where blogging fits in this formula, btw.)

What my current project is trying to do is create an archive of what people are thinking, reading, watching and doing at this moment given the challenges their work is posing to who they think they are. As Lauren put it in her talk, it is an attempt to capture the sense of ‘animated suspension’ experienced by a particular class fraction that has lost the comfort and reassurance of its previous gestures and their accompanying narratives of sacrifice and reward. For Lauren, ‘precarity’ is the cul-de-sac or sideways mobility that defines the present and has replaced the mobilising motive of deferred gratification that once assured ‘the good life’.

Of course, what this means for education is radical. Whereas education was once part of the guarantee for certain forms of class-based security (what I have described elsewhere in relation to the ‘patronage model’) we might now have to understand it as a training ground for developing habits that can flourish in or withstand conditions of precarity. It involves giving students the means to cope with ‘the new normal’.

Clearly I think this means being frank about the challenges students will face in the workplace when they leave the relative privilege of the university. But it also means admitting that we as teachers are caught up in the same trends we’re discussing – and that we need students’ help in understanding them. So the graduate course I’m currently teaching with Mark Andrejevic and Graeme Turner, ‘The Work of Media Consumption’, attempts this dialogue, in a way that I hope is fitting the model of collaborative writing and teaching that the Birmingham Centre for Cultural Studies pioneered. After a class like last night’s, I can’t imagine doing anything else for a living.

But teaching cultural studies must also involve being honest about the ways that academic life in general and cultural studies in particular reproduces aspects of the outside world: how it, too, has a star system, has uncomfortable relations with capitalism, and — because of the pressures these things bring — how it sometimes fails to see the difference between writing a first and second draft. Perhaps practicing cultural studies today involves fighting for the time to point out these distinctions and make them matter, as well as realising when particular ambitions for the field need to be put to rest.

Category: Teaching, Travel

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