Comments on: anti-cultural anti-nostalgia

by: AMATEUR

Fri, 12 May 2006 03:07:59 +0100

Frivolous bastardisation of our punctuation is one of the key witnesses to the current decline of our wonderful nation.

by: ADULT

Fri, 12 May 2006 02:47:42 +0100

Evil Science Chick’s …but mostly rants

by: Jazza

Wed, 23 Nov 2005 01:16:49 +0000

Yes, sounds an interesting paper. And my own research engages (in part) with the question of what constitutes ‘Australian cultural studies’? What makes it so ‘Australian’? Indeed, how is ‘Australian’ understood here? So much
here to energise my research and that of other writers!

And yes, is nice there are folks out there still listening to Icehouse and Blind Melon. Strange band-bedfellows indeed! Can you believe it’s been 10 years since Shannon Hoon died? A real 1990s flashback
there, and a good one, at that.

by: s0metim3s

Sun, 20 Nov 2005 02:54:56 +0000

My experience of CultStud is non-existent as study, and mostly in political encounters, with some students who thought Foucault wanted to incite confessionals about sex or who thought it was a way to not talk about class, poverty, economics. And, maybe because I never studied it, never encountered it as a canon, but in politics, I never thought of Meaghan Morris as a CultStud, in part because her relationship to the academy was often so tenuous. I thought of her as part of the post-Althusserian fragments, circles and debates around the late-CPA of the time.

by: Jon

Sat, 19 Nov 2005 19:42:35 +0000

I’m not sure about a more recent re-emergence of Gramsci; maybe. Thanks for the link to the Crossroads review. In suitable anti-nostalgic style, my response to the notion that Cultural Studies was somehow more real, more vital when it was housed in portakabins in a field in Birmingham is to try to understand how and why the Gramscian turn took place in the first place. But Cultural Studies has also been, often quite literally, populist since, oh, the 1950s or so.

And as for Crossroads, I went to what I think was the first one, in Tampere, and vowed not to return.

by: goingsomewhere

Sat, 19 Nov 2005 13:21:44 +0000

Hi Jon, thanks for commenting! Yeah, Australia does seem to be a bit more heterogeneous — although nowadays, it seems, Morris and Bennett are lauded in the same breath as oz cult stud folk heroes, somewhat obscuring any possibility of differentiation.

I knew about the 70\’s Gramscian \’turn\’, but I was actually referring to what I\’ve heard described as the re-emergence of Gramsci (maybe through much more recent Laclau and Mouffe work?) over the last five or six years. I\’m trying to remember where I heard this — maybe in a review of last year\’s CrossRoads conference? (http://info.interactivist.net/article.pl?sid=04/10/02/2021233&mode=nested&tid=9)

by: Jon

Sat, 19 Nov 2005 12:27:39 +0000

Ah, yes, Australia always used to be different in its take-up of cultural studies (my sense it is much less so these days): both the best, as in the Meaghan Morris crowd of para-Deleuzians, and the worst, with Tony Bennett’s negotiating with the ISAs.

As for the date of the Gramscian turn: though Williams had introduced Gramsci to British Cultural Studies in his “Base and Superstructure” article of 1973 (and others had cited him earlier), the key moment was around 1978/1979, when apparently the folk at the Birmingham Centre devoted the year to reading The Prison Notebooks.

But their reading was also strongly inflected through Laclau’s then-recent Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory, so the version of hegemony that proved influential in Cultural Studies is essentially Laclau’s.