Nostalgia in the house. This week I’ve been creating playlists of music I heard at five (James Taylor), seven (Mike Oldfield), ten (Dylan), twelve (Icehouse), nineteen (Blind Melon, NIN, Porno for Pyros). Today I also went looking for a second-hand mobile phone — yep, I’m succumbing, again — in pawnshops around Brunswick.

I don’t go into pawnshops much nowadays. When I was 19, some friends moved en masse from downmarket student digs in the Western suburbs of Melbourne to a tiny terrace house in Fitzroy. I lived round the corner in Carlton, and together we experienced the ‘inner-city lifestyle’. Even paying $55.00 rent per week, it was hard. My friends got into the habit of hocking their CD collections once a month. The cash mostly, or always, fed a raging communal drug habit: even if we needed the money for food, it always ended up going to pot. None of us had jobs except N., who sometimes gave tarot readings over the phone.

I never actually got around to hocking stuff myself. Too middle-class squeamish — plus I only owned three CDs. But I would go with N. in her small yellow car to Smith St, where she was on first name terms with the pawnbroker. And at the same time, we lived in the heart of Fitzroy. When we wanted a coffee, even barefoot, we would go to Mario’s, with white tablecloths and heavy glasses, to be served by waiters wearing ties. Then we’d hang out on the street, or at the outside tables in the Black Cat’s shrubbery, pooling change for a shared beer. I had an ex who used to sit in the Black Cat and ‘write’ — although he was a photographer, not a writer, in fact had a dyslexic inability to read more than the first two syllables of words accurately — pronouncing ‘Rasmussen’ when a sign said ‘Rosamund’, for instance — and I’m pretty sure he just wanted to pick up chicks. But nevertheless. It was thought mean to point out that ‘writing’ in cafes was pretentious horseshit. Every one of my friends was a refugee from the country or the outer suburbs. None of us had ever lived in a place where you could sit somewhere and write without getting beaten up or stared at.

It’s sad, really. We wanted so much to be bohemian. All we ever were was poor. And this is where nostalgia comes undone. If I think about it, I know we were listening to music like Blind Melon because we were hysterically depressed. We smoked a lot of pot because we weren’t really bohemian. Life was crushing us already, on a micropolitical scale, through unwanted pregnancies, eviction, bad trips, parking fines, debt and feuds related to who bought the last drugs and who should buy them next. The thing that got me out, aside from the last and irresolvable feud, was reading The History of Sexuality Volume One and realising that when I grew up I wanted to be Foucault.

Which brings me to my next line of anti-nostalgia. It’s ten years since I first came into contact with the phrase “cultural studies” and thought it was hot. I wonder if, back then, my interpretation of it was a little skewed. Jon at Post-Hegemonic Musings correctly argues that cultural studies is an anti-politics — at the very least, ‘cultural studies’ in its Gramscian incarnation, focused on successive movement through articulation-ideology-right conjuncture-hegemony; and/or a cultural studies which desires to address the ‘government’ or capture the party.

It’s weird. When we ‘did’ Gramsci in a Cultural Studies class in 1996, I didn’t come away with the impression that hegemony was a good thing. Gramsci was more a footnote to some of Stuart Hall’s work on diasporas and anti-identity-politics than a theorist with his own ‘week’. Cultural Studies, or the version of it we were being taught, seemed to be much more about French theorists of postmodernity, Meaghan Morris and some crazy postcolonial stuff than this odd, programmatic neo-Leninist tripe. (On a related note — can someone tell me when, exactly, the ‘Gramscian turn’ happened? When did CS become coterminous with ‘articulation/hegemony’ etc?) CS meant, then, a space for critiques of traditional Marxism that dismissed queer politics, riot grrl, zines, media activism etc as ‘merely cultural’; it meant a space where the old rules governing the critical reading of ‘literature’ no longer applied. It meant having shitfights with Trotskyists about whether the “Cyberfeminist Manifesto” was political.

Maybe that’s one of the weird by-products of returning to the academy after a long time away. Things you think you ‘know’ become other things, the meaning of which you can’t grasp. I’m wondering now if it’s just my own misrememberings that positioned cult stud as the condition of possibility of this rioting, crazyquilt new way of being political. Maybe I was just ignoring what I didn’t like. The important thing is, however, that whatever CS might once have been, even in fantasy, it now has a proper name. And according to McGowan, an Answer. (Oh GOD.) Which makes the task Jon is working on all the more important:

to uncover what has been obscured in these substitutions, and then to outline the means by which their suppression has been achieved, enforced, naturalized, and legitimated. In sum, social order has to be disarticulated, to reveal both its mute underside and the process by which it has been ventriloquized, made to speak but in another’s voice.

Bring on disarticulation.