Literary Generationalism c1995

(Another revised section from the thesis intro)

Literary generationalism

Literary politics holds a central place in Mark Davis’ Gangland: Cultural Elites and the New Generationalism. Davis’ forensic tracking of the networks of Australia’s media and cultural elite extant in the early to mid 1990s is given an explicitly literary focus through two moments in 1995 when the Australian literary field and literary works became flashpoints in the Australian instantiation of the culture wars. The publication of Helen Darville’s award-winning historical novel of Ukranian complicity in the Jewish Holocaust, The Hand the Signed the Paper, and Helen Garner’s new-journalist account of a sexual harassment case at Melbourne University’s Ormond College, The First Stone, pushed Australian literature and position-holders in the field into areas of the public sphere normally held by politicians, reviewers and media in-house commentators. Both texts involved young women whose practices of authenticity, speaking position or institutional politics were causes for polarising debates and attacks that left in their wake a striking “reorganisation of public space” (Davis 1997: 210).

The Demindenko affair raised two key issues. In a time when official multiculturalism was under sustained conservative attack, the revelation of the author’s non-‘ethnic’ identity gave succour to those critics who thought the bestowal of the prestigious Miles Franklin on the novel was an act of political correctness. For these critics the fraud Darville perpetrated exposed and mirrored the fraud that multiculturalism was. The novel’s complex representation of anti-semitism also prompted a heated public debate where claims about the freedom and rights of the literary imagination were subjected to counterclaims about an author’s duty to historical truth and definitive moral judgement.

The debates over Garner’s work intersected with those active in the Demindenko affair through the trope of political correctness. In the case of The First Stone the flashpoint of political correctness was sparked off from claims that feminism had reached its end-point by achieving the conditions for formal gender equality and that a new, puritan and punitive victim-feminism was gaining institutional support. This new feminism was seen by Garner and key position-holders in the literary and public spheres as unfairly disadvantaging, and in some cases destroying, men. It was also seen as derailing the gains that second-wave feminists, like Garner, claimed to have made. The debates over the issues that Garner’s work brought to the surface of the mainstream public sphere were often played out in the terms of conflicting generations: mothers and daughters; old and new feminists, fighting over the direction of feminism’s projects, and over who had the proprietorial rights to this direction considering “the unsuitability of young women as heirs to the feminist tradition” (84).

Garner’s The First Stone set up the generational trope in Australian feminism as a key form through which debate was to proceed. Few voices entering this debate were able to step around and outside the powerful symbolism of older Mother feminists – who had wisdom to impart and the experience on which such knowledge was based – instructing and fretting over newer, daughter feminists – who had new forms of knowledge and experience that second wave feminists lacked. To see feminism cleave through such polarising public talk only confirmed conservative views of the self-interestedness of its claims: feminism had gone too far because it was, like any lobby group, or ‘industry’, serving its own interests.

In contrast to these two literary events of 1995, Davis gives less analysis to the other minor literary event of the year: Grunge fiction. For Davis the trope of generationalism is again active in the literary public sphere reception of grunge fiction; structuring how liberal literary coteries responded to the dirty realism of Tsiolkas, Ettler, Jaivin, Berridge and McGahan’s fictions.

What links these three events of 1995 is how young voices were lost in the welter of debates that mark the ascendance of the Neo-conservative backlash to Neoliberalism in the form of the culture wars. Yet rather than see these young voices – Tsiolkas and Darville’s narrators and the young women of Ormond College – as expressing and acting on the basis of new experiences and knowledges and bringing these into the literary public sphere, I contend that the cultural form of the youth-to-adulthood period of transition – the period of an individual’s coming-of-age – is inseparable from what is at stake in each of these three events. In Gangland Davis opens up this line of analysis, working on the boundaries between politics and culture. His discussion of Grunge fiction is less concerned with literary form and narrative technique than with the terms on which it was received. Here again we find that the tropes of generationalism structure the critical response. Yet if generationalism is a cultural form that is clearly highly charged in Australian political culture in the early to mid 1990s then the fiction concerned with one of western modernity’s primary flashpoints of human generationalism – the coming-of-age period – demands to be read as fiction that is also about, rather than merely expressing, the dominant cultural forms of coming-of-age. The boundary work I am arguing for here involves reading Grunge fiction again as metafictions on the literary form of coming-of-age.

The economy as sick machine

David Burchell's latest op-ed piece in today's Australian was an interesting analysis of the use of illness as metaphor in current political discourse on the financial crisis. Burchell observes, regarding a recent speech from PM Rudd, that it

revolve[d] almost entirely around a series of metaphors of infection and disease.

Our financial system is the lifeblood of our economy. Yet now the bloodstream has been "poisoned" by the contagion of "toxic assets" from Wall Street. The economy won't return to normal functioning until we have purged the blood of these impurities. "Sick and unhealthy assets have the capacity to affect healthy assets"; "it's like a virus which, if left untreated, can easily spread". Through intelligent economic analysis we have discovered the cause of the virus and are now in a position to treat it. Rudd is the nation's trusted medical specialist, cutting out the cancers of financial impropriety, bringing relief when no mere apothecary can.

The News Ltd op-ed calls for some element of culture-war fisticuffs and Burchell obliges by framing his article with some swipes at Susan Sontag's essay "Illness as metaphor":

THREE decades ago cultural critic Susan Sontag wrote a modish series of essays for The New York Review of Books on the subject of illness as metaphor. Sontag had been undergoing breast cancer therapy, and she was in an angry frame of mind. From where she stood it seemed as if the various metaphors of illness routinely deployed in literature chiefly served to obscure the things they were supposed to describe, all the while demeaning sufferers of illness by pathologising them in one way or another. (And so tuberculosis sufferers succumbed because they were too emotionally charged; cancer sufferers because they were too uptight.) Instead she claimed that "the most truthful way of regarding illness is one most purified of, most resistant to, metaphoric thinking".

In the manner of so many cultural critics before and since, Sontag took this fairly straightforward germ of insight and spun a complicated and implausible web of totalising implications out of it. All metaphors of illness demean sufferers; metaphors in general are designed to deceive; and so on. Then (in a startling piece of circular logic, of the kind clever critics succumb to surprisingly often) she asserted that societies such as ours are obsessed with metaphors of illness because they themselves are profoundly sick in some way. Our views on cancer are "a vehicle" for our "reckless improvident responses to our real problems of growth", our "inability to construct an advanced industrial society which properly regulates consumption", and so on. All the grand arm-waving gestures of the cultural critic turned economic prophet.

So, what does Burchell offer instead of the "overblown" illness metaphors? Try this:

Yet the easy-credit regime of the past decade was not just a sign of economic loose living, of too much steak and not enough green veggies. Plentiful capital was the necessary engine of the high-growth, high-demand global economy to which we've become accustomed. Likewise, China's extraordinary levels of growth were possible only because Chinese capital, lacking any useful domestic domicile, had to migrate elsewhere, thus providing the credit bubble with its necessary fuel. In turn, we became used to the idea that modest growth in real incomes could be facilitated by extravagant levels of gross domestic product growth.

The 'reality', or the non-metaphoric level of discourse, seem to be machinic: engines, fuel, growth. I mean, seriously, do economies actually grow, or is this just another biological metphor, in the same category as illness tropes?

American financial guru Warren Buffett was quoted today, via Huff Post, saying that the American economy had "fallen off a cliff". But, optimistically, Buffett also claimed that "Everything will be alright. We do have the greatest economic machine that's ever been created".

And there's the rub, for machines don't get sick like bodies do, and more importantly they don't die. Machines can be tinkered with, redesigned, fuelled, have parts replaced. It's telling that Burchell and Buffett seems to be speaking the same economic discourse, for both side with the concept of the economy as rational. Yet both also seem to want to hedge their bets, and bring biological tropes and anthropomorphic figures into their discourse. If I were to read these discourses symptomatically, as Sontag provides a model for in her still relevant essays on illness and metaphor, I'd say that the economy is a sick machine: a fucked-up cyborg that has viral and mechanical problems.

Crow - Broken Machine (Live, 1999)

The Oz's resident burnt-out leftie

I wrote a while back about The Oz's op-ed columnist David Burchell and his use of Neoliberal language. Burchell is a political science academic who specializes in the Australian Labor Party, and whose recent appearance in The Australian as an opinion-page cultural warrior is puzzling, especially as his pieces are consistently aimed at what the right in the cultural wars present as being the soft, liberal and cultural left.

Today's column is firmly within the culture warrior genre, with the upcoming US Presidental inauguration made the backdrop to Burchell's critique of US Left cultural war attacks on George W Bush. That there might have been a Right-wing front to the US, and Australian, culture wars is not mentioned in the article. Maybe this is because the assumptions of the Right's culture war forays have been:

they started it

we won

they want to take our freedom away

what the pseudo left call culture we call morality.

I've been tempted to write another post about Burchell's articles in The OZ but after reading Guy Rundle's piece from Crikey today, this paragraph puts it better than I could:

David Burchell [is] the resident burnt-out leftie in the Oz, whose current role in life seems to be to make Gerard Henderson pleasant-reading by comparison. Burchell's sneering, snide, exhausting tone is sour grapes, raised to the level of vineyard status -- joining the Communist Party well after Prague '68, editing the Australian Left Review until it died beneath him, then developing a Foucault-obsession, and a political mancrush on Mark Latham, the sole argument of this lifelong inner-circle editor and academic is that he's a voice against the elites. For Burchell, Obama's popularity will melt as surely as Rudd's has done in Australia.

Quite possibly, but you have to be seriously ignorant of what's happened in America -- or only interested in denying the legitimacy of any political event that passed you by -- to believe that much comparison between Rudd and Obama is of much use at all. Quite aside from the historical import of the Obama election as an event – if nothing else happened, it would still be significant -- the situation of America, of US society, is so fundamentally different that the challenges and possibilities presented to Obama are of a different order. To make some modest reforms to the US health system -- something achievable given the corrupt US set-up of, well, everything -- would save tens of thousands of lives, and alleviate a great deal of unnecessary uffering and fear for tens of millions of people.

For America, the odest and centrist administration proposed by Obama is radical, because it is rational, and we haven't had much of that in the past eight years. Some cultural liberals may well be disappointed, but so what. The Obama victory was a mass movement, not a few articles in the New Yorker (though it's easy to think so if ou confuse the limits of your study with the limits of the world). Burchell sounds like most of the US right, and they didn't get it either, which is why
they lost.

Burchell's trajectory is an interesting one that, as Rundle recognises, passes through the Foucauldian governmentality school. That such a passage could lead to the Neoconservative camp is perhaps not so surprising. Mitchell Dean argues that for all its followers' claims to it being neither "descriptive nor normative but 'analytical and diagnostic'" the governmentality approach to considerations of political power is indeed normative and descriptive. For Dean, the usefulness of governmentality as a heuristic

is limited unless combined with a set of minimal presuppositions about the nature of the political and the project for governing society. Otherwise, the study of governmentality will tend to be captured by its own privileged object, the governmental discourses found in liberal democracy (Governing Societies, 2007: 50-51)

Burchell, on this account, has not so much moved away from the Foucauldian method of governmentality analysis as let the animating presuppositions of a Neoconservative culture war backlash, which aim to restore the damage down by 30 years of Neoliberal consensus, appear as the commonsense of his op-ed articles.

un-Hooked on Classics: Beethoven and the Higher Disco after Adorno

Professor Robert Walker from School of English, Media and Performing arts University of NSW, Sydney responds to Mark Bahnisch's opinion piece in The Australian 'Fable of the Cultural Elite'.

Walker isn't interested in the political and social context into which Bahnisch's essay is situated: the current round of culture wars that are in play, albeit with less vigour than before the ALP victory last November, and how battles in these wars turn around issues of public funding, the politics of recognition and redistribution, and History and English curricula. Walker's riposte instead contents itself by rehearsing the Kantian discourse of judgement of the sublime: the discourse which Pierre Bourdieu has done so much to historicise and to analyse for its use in the reproduction of stratified social classes. Walker will have none of this sociological infection invading the religious experience of sophisticated art: the sort of art that only an emotionally, intellectually, musically and aesthetically educated, and thereby sophisticated, person is capable of understanding and appreciating. Not the three-minute pop song (philistine, rubbish, appealing to the base emotions), but rather a Beethoven symphony.

I have some sympathy for Walker's view. I'm interested in literary and musical form, too. But Walker's Adorno-esque disdain for 'uneducated-art' stops short in a number of ways. Walker's elitism is ignorant of the sociology of form.

An example. Adorno's sociology of musical form saw him support Schoenberg's modernist innovations in advancing musical form into a break with harmony and tonality: twelve tone music. How an audience heard this music would, of course depend on how they heard the tonal music of Beethoven. That said, Adorno wasn't content to talk of the sophistication and education of the experience of Schoenberg's performances (where Walker ends his formal-cultural lessons). For Adorno the break with tonality marks a break with the logics of commodity exchange and reificiation.

Now the point here is that there is a homology established between musical and social forms, and that the dominant nexus (harmony and commodity exchange) is broken by a new organising logic: twelve-tone music. But while Adorno's sociology of musical form is exemplary it is only one version of how the logic and order of harmony and tonality in musical form is broken with.

Robert Fink has written, in the shadow of Adorno (the new musicology), about the emergence of pulse-pattern-minimalism music: Steve Reich's compositions, for example. Fink's argument, which sits alongside that of Jacques Attali's in Noise: the political economy of music, is that Reich's music is a form in which we can think the media sublime. The way Fink puts this is to argue that Reich's Music for Eighteen Musicians, like Donna Summer and Giorgio Moroder's "Love to love you baby", are both musical performances of a refiguring of the desires that advertising's repetitions play through us.

Anyone that has heard that extra-diegetic musical section (music that is incidental to the action) in an American sit-com, or movie, even in Australian movies and dramas, where mallett instruments (vibraphones, xylophones etc) play a motiff that is counterpointed and repeated (often signifying the repetition of everyday cyclic time, and often what is experienced in a city-office job) will have heard the after-echoes of Reich's piece. This form has entered popular culture and it's condescending for Walker to invoke the elitism of his Kantian judgement while not recognising that we use the forms of Reich's, and let's admit it, disco's, music to make sense of a world in which media repetition is constantly shaping our desires.

Another break with tonality is that which arises out of the drone-noise movement, of which John Cale's mentor, Lamonte Young, was a practitioner. Cale, trained as a classical viola player, moved into the Andy Warhol Factory orbit in the mid 1960s, joining up with Lou Reed and formed the popart band the Velvet Underground. While the VU did employ pulse pattern music ("Waiting for my Man") it was Cale's electrified viola drones, overdriven valve amplifier noise, that has had such a lasting influence on popular music. The drone and noise, also break with the tonality which Walker's examplar - Beethoven - would, on this (the post-Adorno sociology of musical form) account, be locked into. And the drone, the electrified noise, are now commonplaces of popular music.

That we make sense of the contemporary world through the forms of popular music that we experience through TV shows, as disco and its afterwards, as the electrified noises and drones of a million pop songs, doesn't mean that we cannot experience the sublime. It's just that unlike Walker, we learnt how to live with, sometimes resist, sometimes negate and get around the media and commmodity sublimes of the contemporary world by taking these forms and putting them to work in our everyday lives. To call us lovers of the pop sublime uneducated, philistine, capable of only appreciating the *spits* music of base instincts is precisely the performance of distinction that Bourdieu exposed as deelpy imbricated in class stratification.

Loosen up Professor: there's not much you can do for the barbarians have long ago moved into the house of fine music and locking the gate won't stop us from getting out.

We have always been at culture war: Fables of the reconstruction- reconstruction of the fables

Larvatus Prodeo is one of the more livelier, open group blogs on the Web. Largely concerned with Australian federal politics, it also surveys cultural events, low and high, and debates. I'm an avid reader and enjoy the dialogue. There are some hilarous and learned posters here, and some trolls whose provocations bring out the wits and bitchery (or the bits and witchery - don't know what this means, I just like the sound of it).


It sometimes needs to be said, however, that LP is a generator of left populism. This is not a problem, and I'm on board with the project. Indeed, after nearly 11 years of neo-liberal/neo-conservative hybrid leadership in the Australian federal parliament, the battle to generate and disseminate such left populist terms as 'working families', 'mortgage stress', and the 'kitchen table' (where the lived economy is experienced), were part of the verbal-armoury that Rudd's social liberal/ neoliberal team have fought, and mostly won, the public debate with.

This was and contines to be no easy struggle. The hegemony formerly ascendant in the reactionary conservative ex-Government Gazette (as posters at LP named it) was one fought through a right-populism that claimed to speak on behalf of ordinary Australians. The GG's ordinary Australians (aka Howard Battlers), it was claimed, supported Prime Minster Howard in such matters as: joining the COW in Iraq, in turning away the Tampa, and in refusing an apology for the Stolen Generations. Indeed, Howard seemed to often take his tunes from the songbook at the ex-GG: running battlefronts, in this round of the culture wars, along the terrain of High School History and English curricula - especially Australian history.

The loss of government for Howard's coalition, in late 2007, was one which many ordinary Australians, and now Howard Government ministers, attribute to the anti-egalitarian regulations of the Workchoices Industrial Relations legislation introduced, then slightly retuned with the addition of the 'fairness test', during the last parliament. That the GG commentariat, and their bloc in Quadrant, at the CIS and IPA, reaching into the talkback radio waves and others in the News Ltd. fold, were chief spruikers and backers for Workchoices (I & II) must now leave them feeling as though their finely tuned attennae for discerning the feelings and thoughts of ordinary Australians were out of whack. These Howardistas, we now know, were practicing right-wing populism: they weren't speaking for the majority at all - not on Workchoices!

Who were they speaking for then?

Maybe it's less important to talk of constituencies, as groups of citizens that media figures (writers, journalists, TV interviewers and hosts, talkback radio hosts, and, of course, politicians) attempt to persuade, than it is to talk of constituences who are mobilised into identifying themselves as a particular type of citizen because of the appeals made to them through language and signs. Judy Brett, for example, has pointed out that Robert Menzies' use of the radio, as medium for his speeches, and his term 'the forgotten people', which was mobilised within a broader set of terms animated by the morality of the middle-class, together enabled him to draw out the idea of the citizen as private-sphere, homeowning and thrifty. (This argument is influenced by Capling, Considine, Crozier Australian Politics in the Global Era 1998). And if it's language and media that largely constitute politics, then how we communicate what ordinary Australians, in this case, are thinking and feeling is how politics occurs.

Debate and language are important, and this is why threads in the culture wars have been animated over issues of terminology: stolen or rescued generation? The black armband, or white blindfold view of Australian history? And this battle to naturalise terms, the normalization of language, is probably happening less in the broadcast and mainstream media, than on the Web: on sites like Larvatus Prodeo.

On LP the debates and posts are, of course, open to contest, evidence, logical and rhetorical reshaping and it would be reductive to argue that the aim of many of the posts on this blog are driven by a desire to shape public debate only in terms of a demonisation of the enemies of the Labor party and its bloc. There is more to LP than this. But the left populism is certainly there. Which brings me to the culture wars.


It's been odd, to say the least, to have watched Tony Jones, host of ABC1's Lateline, this week in the context of the National Sorry statement. Jones framed significant sections of his panel (with Prof. Henry Reynolds and Gerard Henderson) discussion, and subsequent interview# with Prime Minister Rudd, around the culture wars. Jones asked repeatedly if the Apology signalled that these divisive wars, said to be a phenomenon of the Howard period, were now over? I think this is certainly a question that needs to be asked, but it needs to be qualified: is this round in the current culture wars now resolved?

Mark Bahnisch, Larvatus Prodeo's lead writer, has recently used the findings of a British sociology study on class and taste to argue that charges of cultural elitism, in Australia during the 'culture wars', now, if they ever did, have no basis in fact. The argument for charging people with cultural elitism runs something like this: a taste for chardonnay and lattes is what inner-urban, university educated middle-class, social-liberals who controlled public institutions like the ABC, the humanities departments in Universities, Arts bodies, and the Other broadsheet producers in Australia, have. Such 'tastes', so the imputation went, married class to consumption: the elite controlled public spending by virtue of controlling the judgement of taste. And part of the cultural elite's judgement was their moral judgement on ordinary, tax-paying, hard-working Australians.


Bahnisch is right to point to research in order to argue that the charge of cultural elitism was a right-populist smokescreen. Sure there are examples of university research projects that seem arcane, ABC radio hosts that might stretch political correctness too far - but how arcane research at universities is cannot be judged by reading headline summaries of ARC grant proposals online, and what might seem arcane now might prove to be centrally significant in 10 to 50 years time: that's the nature of research. Similarly, the boundaries of civility, not to mention legality, in talk-radio impose correctness to the kinds of speech permissible. The ridiculousness of the claim of there being a cloak of political correctness which unjustlty censors one's right to voice ignorant, sexist and racist hate, is like arguing that I have a right to offend whoever the fuck I want, and you are being offensively condescending if you try and stop me.


So, the culture wars have been fought on some of this turf. The fabled cultural elites, as Bahnisch argues, is indeed a fable. The smokescreen under which capital has been accruing to the new and old bourgeoisie whose elite power we should be holding up to scrutiny.


But the broader point is that I don't think that the culture wars, per se, are over. There is, as I listed above, a vocabulary of left populism. Who can really argue that the new Industrial Relations legislation is a victory for anything except a more socially concerned neo-liberalism? The culture wars have shifted, and the Apology marks a new affective terrain on which they will be fought. The danger is to fall, at least unknowingly, for any populism: especially from the Left.



# Rudd's posing of a series of his own questions and answering them during an interview needs a new term. I propose 'the intraview': Good to be with me!

Debating postmodernism and postmodernity

Who are you talking (back) to? What's this address? What are the (inter- or) con-texts of this debate, this diagreement, this conversation?



In debates about postmodernism's genealogy, its meaning, its designs on curriculum in High School education, I think the first questions that need to be asked are those above. So, here I'm writing back to an essay published on Adrienswords blog May 22, 2007 'Postmodernism is/not a dirty word'. This writing back is also in anticipation of a promised subsequent essay from Adrien on related issues; in particular a diagnosis of contagions in Humanities discourse, especially the viral influence of the needless complexity of Judith Butler's writing.



Firstly some positions. I come to this debate after having been a dismissive skeptic on the value of postmodernism. Not having understood what this term meant, its genealogy and various definitions, I had swallowed an empiricist - Old Left - view (Boris Frankel's in From the Prophets the deserts come -1992). In this definition postmodernism was a theory and practice of writing in which language is posited as being as close to reality as human-beings got. Language is reality. This assertion is more properly one of structuralism or poststructuralism, although there is considerable crossover between these various 'isms' and schools of writing.


Having taken an Arts degree at UNSW in the 1990s, majoring in Australian and postcolonial literatures, literary criticism and literary theory, I was exposed to poststructuralist ideas much more than postmodern ones. This makes sense, as it was compulsory to take a semester of Linguistics in first year, and the compulsory literary theory component was centred on first learning the methodology of structuralist analaysis, then post-structuralism. In hindsight my interest in Marty Heidegger's Being and Time, was a response to the desire to anchor the groundless methodology of structuralist analysis into the finitude of death. That such an anchoring has problems, mostly arising from its individualism, was something that encountering Marxist philosophies of history has helped to solve. Walter Benjamin's Messianic time, as the 'time' at-in [prepositions start to break down at this point!], the whole of history is redeemed, enables a way into thinking the finitude of Heidegger's being-toward-death as social.


However, its no longer 1994 and after a hiatus I have returned to University - UTas - to complete a doctorate in recent Australian Literature. The second book my supervisor advised me to read was Fredric Jameson's Postmodernism:or the cultural logic of late capitalism. Further on I also read David Harvey's The condition of postmodernity. An essay that's influenced my thinking on these matters is by John Frow 'What was post-modernism' from Time and commodity culture, and the writing of Zygmunt Bauman in his 'liquid modern' (see Liquid modernity) phase has profoundly shaped my thinking about periodisations, and about how the post- in post-modernism, or post-modernity, is merely a marker for a new, or different, type or phase, of modernity. Thus for Bauman, the shift in recent times has been from solid to liquid modernity, from heavy to light capitalism. While Bauman is attempting, successfully I think, to address a wide public through this simple conceptual schema, his writing is conceptually dense, and leavened with illustrations and citations. But the suasive force of his intervention (replacing post- with liquid -) can be seen in the connotations this term has in the language of our times: financial liquidity, global flows, mobility and flexibility. It won't have gone unnoticed that Bauman alludes to Marx's poetic image of capitalist-modernity: all that is solid melts into the air.



This is a Marxist-influenced list of texts on modernism, modernity and what comes after. And this is what I think needs to be spelled out in this debate: that for these writers postmodernity is descriptive and their work attempts to explain and critique this descriptive. Far from the commonplace view, that postmodernism is a viral normative project, I'd like to emphasis the critiques and attacks on postmodernity, on the normative postmodernism(s), that these thinkers and writers made and make.


Still, there is confusion here and this sense of misunderstanding is due to questions in the field of the philosophy of history. These questions are very rarely posed in the mainstream media, because thinking about time and history is so ingrained and normalized. Indeed, while we might read about developing nations, or the Western tradition, the Enlightenment, even modernity, in the MSM, what are we talking of precisely when these phrases appear? Was there one Enlightenment? Or is Enlightenment an attitude, manifesting an operation of thought whereby we can say that Enlightenment thought is like religious thought, it is a specific practice rather than a period that forever changed how and what we think and practice. Or, take the commonplace terms of developing and developed nations. This historicism sets up a teleological shape to human history which is also universal: all nations are, or aspire to be, heading in the same direction: liberal-democratic-capitalist (to take the most obvious example of this form of historicism from the post-1989 period).

Some fragments to be expanded on later:

But the keyterm here is modern and its extensions: modern-ism and modern-ity. In order to beigin to understand the post- versions of this word, we first need to focus on its root.



One assumption in this debate-conversation is that the only value of a discourse on/of postmodernism/ity centres on Secondary Education and the teaching of disciplines in the Liberal Arts/Humanities. This assumption is not unwarrented, but can easily limit the debate to the sorts of terms and understandings that 'Parents' claim as their right.


Similarly, if your understanding of the politics of postmodernism-ity comes out of Camille Paglia then you've no real claim to be setting yourself up as an expert on the arguments of those engaged in the discourse surrounding postmodernism-ity. Again we come to philosophy of history. And from my reading of those who are influenced by this [i.e Paglia and such] culture war polemic style of writing-thinking, the concept of history promoted is one of dualistic spiritual battle (eros vs thanatos, or Apollonian vs Dionysian), or biology vs culture contest.




Another set of problems:

a. The history of cultural studies - here, Peter Osborne in his The Politics of Time [see link in sidebar], makes a vital link in the chain, when he asserts that Cultural Studies is a/one political legacy of Surrealism (p185);

b. The history of English as a discipline;

c. The disciplinary methods-boundaries: the ethnographic claims of cultural studies, the close-reading and critical claims of literary criticism/English.