CSAA Secretariat:
Mark Gibson
School of Media, Communication & Culture
Murdoch University
South Street, Murdoch
WA 6150
Tel: (08) 9360 2951 Fax: (08) 9360 6570
email: mgibson@central.murdoch.edu.au

I am taking some time off from reading papers, briefs, transcripts and books on broadcasting in a converged media environment, datacasting, ADSL, multiplexing, 3G mobile systems, wireless application protocol (WAP) and all the rest to voice 'a short reflection on the policy arc in Australian cultural studies'. Mark Gibson, the Secretary of CSAA, who knows how to push the right buttons, put me up to this!. He asked me to consider "to what extent has [the policy moment] brought a permanent change in the terrain", 'how closely was the policy moment tied to the incumbency of labour governments in Canberra?' and 'Where does the policy momentum go from here?' I take it from the metaphor of the arc (rather than "ark"?) that we are on the other side of an upswing.

All very good questions and I certainly - as the most 'desperately gung-ho' (Meaghan Morris' words) advocate of applied cultural policy taking a prime position within the academic discourses of cultural and media studies during the 1990's - can't avoid them. Nor would want to.

Moments of academic influence on the policy agenda continue to occur in non-systematic and serendipitous ways. For example, recently one of QUT's PhD students, Elinor Rennie, and her supervisor Christina Spurgeon, were able to play a role in assisting the Community Broadcasting Association of Australia to assist the Greens' work with Labour and the Democrats in the Senate at the eleventh hour during the digital television parliamentary debates to get an amendment that will provide a new object in the Broadcasting Services Act "to ensure the maintenance, and where possible the development, of diversity, including public, community and indigenous broadcasting in the Australian broadcasting system in the transition to digital broadcasting". Terrific!

These kinds of "policy moments" occur relatively rarely and are truly serendipitous. They play out the "handmaiden" role of academia in relation to policy that I talk about in the introduction to Framing Culture. There is also Mark Gibson's sense of the policy moment, which refers to the degree of influence of cultural policy studies on the curriculum content and research agendas of cultural and media studies. I don't know for a fact whether there is 'more' media and cultural policy in cultural and media studies curricula now than there was when Framing Culture was written in the early 1990s. The evidence, anecdotal as it is, would suggest that there is more, given the emergence in that ten year period of new book series, new journals, and the kinds of projects that have received grant funding from, for example, the ARC. And, for the several years, the activities of the Australian Key Centre for Cultural and Media Policy.

It may be that the "policy moment" has been superceded in that period by new academic fashions and rhetorics - citizenship? cult television? cross-cultural audience work? new media and new technologies? globalisation? cyberstudies? creative industries? All of these, if they have for whatever reason neglected to look at the role of policy development and implementation, whether domestic or global, would be doing their students a grave disservice. My sense is that all of the above contemporary hotspots in cultural and media studies routinely need and to some extent do deal with policy conundrums.

I can fairly comfortably restate the general perception that Australian academics in these fields as elsewhere tend to have more porosity with other epistemic communities than academic communities in much larger markets, most particularly the US. As Meaghan Morris, Tom O'Regan and Tim Rowse pointed out in their critiques of Framing Culture and the policy moment, there is a routinised multiskilling or multi-positionality available to those in the Australian academic community who choose to take it up, that cuts across the heuristic dualisms which I may have been trying to erect in Framing Culture. An Australian operator like Ken Wark positions himself as columnist, theorist, producer, advocate, party-political intellectual. Stellar discursive multi-positionality has also always characterised the trajectory of a Meaghan Morris. It is in the commitment to multi-positionality in a more and more hyper-specialised environment which threatens to fracture understanding and action further apart that we can take a role and can earn a position from which to speak.

That is all well and good. However, the "harder" argument of Framing Culture - that academic agendas should be not just informed but substantially set by that which is going on in the lifeworlds of industry and policy - was met with strong resistance amongst critics of my position in the early to mid 1990s. These days, the argument that the agenda should be set by 'exogenous' forces is being replaced by the nearly factual observation that the agenda is being set in this way. To take one example, David Gauntlett, in his new, web-hyped book Web Studies: Rewiring media studies for the digital age, argues that 'media products and the organised use of communications technologies have become so knowing, clever and sophisticated that academic critics were looking increasingly redundant … To make an intelligent film like The Matrix or Fight Club is a substantial achievement, whereas writing a typical academic article is in comparison, pathetic". Media literacy is now so widespread that media studies academics have been outflanked by the savvieness of both producers and consumers of media texts.

Of course, Gauntlett is running the gauntlet on this. As that famous theorist of professional group behaviour Lyndon B. Johnson might have said, 'is he inside the tent pissing out, or outside the tent pissing in'? Let me provide a more nuanced, more policy-orientated example. This is the lessons for cultural and media studies/cultural and media policy studies in the recent digital television policy and legislative processes that have been going on in Australia in the last few years. In the last ten years, policy doxa amongst the left and left of centre, such as opposition to foreign ownership, cultural nationalism, and the primacy of high-end drama production as an expression of national identity have been shaken.

The 'Australian television is amongst the best systems in the world' (and we have this because of our system of 'protection all around' which places 'onerous' social and cultural policy obligations on commercial broadcasters such as Australian content regulation as a trade-off for allowing a commercial broadcasting oligopoly to persist against all principles of competition policy) is a stance which Framing Culture shares, uncomfortably, with Senator Richard Alston, FACTS Director Tony Branigan and most if not all heads of the commercial broadcasting networks. In recent years, it has become clear that this quid pro quo is not working. The amount of surplus value (aka profit) extracted from the system by the oligopolists during the 1990s is wildly out of proportion to the paltry amount returned to the system through Australian content and other regulatory requirements. This has been known within the industry for some time, but it became 'official' public knowledge through the rigorous economic analysis conducted by the Productivity Commission during its broadcasting inquiry in 1999. If the current "protection all around" architecture of broadcasting regulation is not working, what will return appropriate cultural and policy objectives to the Australian people? (By the way, I do not subscribe to the Commission's orthodox economic assumption that this means downscaling or eliminating content regulation. On the contrary, it might mean reregulating to better address the financial inequities current in the system.)

To a significant extent, the economists and industry trends has shifted my position on the defence of Australian content regulation, as advanced in extensio in Framing Culture. Industry reshaping and policy development is resetting the studies agenda. Why should it not be so? Where else do you want renewal and change in academic agendas to come from?

The CSAA Newsletter is always looking for contributions. Apart from the obvious functions of advertising upcoming events, sending out calls for papers etc., the Newsletter is also an 'intermediate' forum somewhere between refereed publication and e-mail or corridor conversation.

What issues are emerging in cultural studies? What excites or annoys? How are conditions for work in cultural studies in your institution? Are you stimulated or irritated by an article that has appeared in this or other issues of the Newsletter? Ideas/positions in any of these areas all very welcome.

I would like, from next issue, to initiate a Zeitgeist section. Have you read something recently which has been particularly stimulating or interesting? If so, let me know. Anything can be included from a simple note to a short review. Hopefully, the section will help build awareness of where debates are going, where the field is moving ...

Mark Gibson
Secretary, CSAA

School of Media, Communication and Culture
Murdoch University
South Street, Murdoch
WA 6150

Earlier in the year I initiated a discussion on the cultural studies list regarding the predilection within cultural studies for certain popular cultural products. These preferences seemed ironic to me, given the fact that cultural studies was partly founded on the critique of the idea of 'the canon' and its presumption of cultural value. It seems a particularly interesting area for us to debate.

My contribution came out of a query from a colleague, who asked me if I knew of any recent material on Star Wars. I checked the databases, and realised that there was very little available (at least here in Australia). So I thought about why this might be so. There's lots of material on Star Trek, and on the tech noir movies of the last 2 decades, and even on the old sci-fi movies of the 1950s. As it turned out, one contributor to the list suggested I'd simply missed the Star Wars wagon, but the issues still seem worth raising here as the selectivity of cultural studies academics about which elements of popular culture we choose to discuss seems an interesting question.

Even if I'm wrong about Star Wars, the same could be said of a number of cultural texts which don't get cultural studies attention. Are we making a new cultural studies (anti-) canon which includes The Simpsons, Blade Runner, X-Files, Oprah, South Park, Buffy, Madonna, and so on, but NOT ... what? (The Bill, Whitney Houston, Parkinson, Lost in Space, Mr Bumpy). And is the question 'why do we choose this?', or 'why don't we choose that?'?

There are several ways of explaining this.

Theory 1. Choose evidence to fit the theory.

We are selective because we look for the texts which 'fit' our models best. This may be, on the one hand, the texts which carry the most ideologically critiquable messages; or, on the other, the most resistive texts, the ones which transgress gender boundaries, celebrate carnivalesque inversions, revel in polysemy and intertextuality. If this is the case, should we be looking for examples which challenge our theoretical models?

Theory 2. cultural [studies] capital.

Is there a kind of hip-based process of distinction going on within academic culture, akin to Bourdieu's argument about the accumulation of cultural capital within the French petit-bourgeoisie? (academics are, after all, petit-bourgeois). The playing out of the field determines that some things get 'agreed upon' as being worthy, and our knowledge of these becomes as central to the making of an intellectual reputation as our deployment of theory. These 'tastes', however, constitute an arbitrary process of distinction which becomes self-validating; we write about whatever has been already written about.

Theory 3. Some things are just better than others.

Amidst all the dross that fills up popular culture, there are programs which stand out as exceptional. I've used this argument for The Simpsons, using criteria promoted within certain strands of literary criticism (not that far removed from an earlier approach to popular culture, which attempted to show that it really was as good as Art). This, however, exhibits the return of the repressed - value - which is accompanied by all the problems that were pointed out several decades ago when literary and cultural studies adopted a relativism towards notions of value.

Some replies suggested it was foolish to think that cultural studies could analyse everything, but this is hardly the point in making explicit the problem of selection. But it also provokes the question of why study popular culture at all. One contributor reminded me of Stuart Hall's comment in "Notes on Deconstructing the Popular" (1981):

"Popular culture is one of the sites where [the] struggle for and against a culture of the powerful is engaged... That is why 'popular culture' matters. Otherwise, to tell you the truth, I don't give a damn about it."

But is that satisfying?

Keynote Speaker:
Fredric Jameson

Convenor:
Ian Buchanan,
School of English,
University of Tasmania
ph: 03 6226 2356
fax: 03 6226 7631
I.Buchanan@utas.edu.au

The Weekend Australian recently ran a feature and some accompanying stories on the theme of "Losing our minds." Unlikely as it might seem, cultural studies academics were cast in the heroic role; as national treasures being lost to the country. The headlines were emphatic:

Brain-drain dumbs universities (news pages);

University funding key to brain drain (leader, p. 18);

The brain drain crisis. Dumb struck: who's saying farewell to the philistines (teaser, p. 19);

Losing our minds. Battered by university cutbacks, lousy salaries and a Government that doesn't seem to care, Australia's intelligentsia is jumping ship (Focus, p. 19):

If Cathy Freeman and Ian Thorpe abandoned Australia, there'd be a national outcry. Then why don't we care about top academics doing just that? (Focus, p. 22) (Weekend Australian, 22-23 July, 2000).

Even though I might have qualified as a lost mind (after leaving Australia for a job in Europe in 1996), I don't count as part of the "brain-drain crisis," not least because I've recently come back. But there's more to it than that. I don't fit the doomsday scenario because I'm not persuaded by the dumbing-down rhetoric. I reckon there's never been a better time to be a cultural studies academic. Certain senior people are pursuing their democratic right to freedom of labour movement, and following the work hither and yon. Despite the headlines this is merely evidence of a healthy international market in cultural studies academics. Hey! Our labour is worthy of its hire!

Ever stopped to wonder why? What makes this a good time for cultural studies, in Australia just as much as anywhere else, is the development of the new economy. Thus far, globally, the new economy has been driven by technological convergence (telcos, broadcasters and software), and by market capitalisation (dotcoms, e-commerce, especially B2B). Next, there's broadbanding and datacasting. As Bill Gates said in Sydney in September, "It's important for us to continue to drive broadband - the policies around the world that will encourage those investments, the software to take advantage of it" (AFR, 12-9-00).

In short, policy, investment and technology are converging on "software" - that is, on content. The content industries include publishing, computer applications, media, design, music, performance, professional writing and journalism. They are the media and textual systems that organise the social production of meaning; the very terrain upon which cultural studies has been bivouacked since Hoggart.

Cultural studies has a good analytical tradition in relation to the content industries, and for their part the content industries have been for some time what I think of as "cultural studies with funding." They are as knowing, sophisticated and daring in their interpretations of subjectivity, power, representation and semiotic innovation as any postmodern guru. Their address to ordinary people, especially young people, holds as much emancipatory potential as does the most impassioned critique of the soi-disant "public intellectual."

The new converged interactive media are broaching what may well turn out to be a fundamental transformation in the means of public story-telling and symbol-circulation. The world is just pulling out of that long modern(ist) Euro-protestant period when things were only true if they were printed (from the bible to science), and art was committed to representation (from Durer to Dali). The times have begun to go "catholic"; iconic, sinful, multicultural, global.

Story, sight, speech, song, and sentiment are all being re-coded. The means of meaning-production are at once fully socialised, in the form of corporations like Microsoft or AOL/Time-Warner, and further individuated, in the sense that the millions now online will soon be billions, and they can participate in public semiosis in "sit up" as well as "sit back" mode.

The modernist, industrial, print-based, "open society" beloved of many university people was a not only a liberal ideal, it was also a ruse to power (or at least to social leadership - what we used to call hegemony) by the secular scientists who sought to rule by expertise. They brought us both freedom and Hiroshima, both first and third worlds. But all that's changing.

We're entering what Manuel Castells calls a new "technological paradigm" within a "network society." It may be regrettably postmodern, but here commercial organisations and media are the public sphere. Democratic activism now is as likely to be conducted through commercial media (even by commercial corporations, from the Bodyshop to Benetton) as it is though oppositional or "independent" institutions like universities, "public service" broadcasters or avant garde publishers.

Naturally enough, many intellectuals and academics dislike that prospect on sight. But the point is, of course, that cultural studies has been studying this new environment for at least a couple of decades, and has used its own public colloquy to think through the implications in some detail.

So - a golden age? Well at least cultural studies can have its collective cake and eat it. It's like the participants on both sides of the barricades at the recent World Economic Forum in Melbourne, who basically agreed with each other that there are environmental and labour costs to globalisation, and a "democratic deficit" in transnational dealings and institutions. Similarly, cultural studies can swing both ways. Those people with allegiances to the cobblestone-chucking activist tactics of the 1960s can crowd around the hired limos of those for whom cultural studies offers business opportunities in the content industries. You can be Daniel Cohn Bendit (Paris '68) or Felix Dennis (Oz trial); poetic revolutionary urban chic (with hippy tree-hugging surfing holidays), or radical media provocateur turned multimillionaire publisher (with porn as the agent of cultural emancipation and, what luck, Felix's personal enrichment).

All new media, from print to the Internet, have been "porn-led" revolutions, in their popular uptake at least - all have relied on despised viewing practices of unworthy cultural forms. Rather than joining the chorus of denunciation, cultural studies has famously taken such historical phenomena seriously, even to the extent of being misunderstood as "celebrating" its object of study.

So it is a good time for cultural studies, because there's no traditional wall of fear and loathing between it and the world it studies. That world is commercial, demotic, games-oriented, and motivated by less than pure consumer desires, never mind the hopes and plans of the suppliers. Cultural studies is itself content-rich, in its own interdisciplinary mode of study, and in its own methods of textual-social-political-historical contextualisation. It knows quite a bit about the interfaces between intellectual endeavour and popular consumerism, between ideas and the everyday, between perving and philosophy. It has much to offer - it might even have predictive value in relation to emergent trends in the knowledge and information revolution, as the new economy rolls from IT to "content."

It's time for higher education to take up the challenge of this new phase. Of course some will want to head straight for the Ethical High Ground on foot (or by Jumbo, in the innocent expectation that things are better overseas). But it ought to be noticed that globalisation, the information revolution and the new economy are morally neutral; they can be used for good or ill, just as the popular media and popular culture can. So before you start yelling into the closed windows of my corporate Fairmont (alas, no limo for jobbing deans), ask yourself upon whose behalf a "radical" intellectual now speaks?

As practiced in the posher sort of universities, the arts and humanities may be nothing more interesting than a supplanted medium. Their heyday was in the nineteenth century, when they were a cutting-edge pedagogy designed for the moral improvement of the leisured classes, affluent women and imperial administrators. How does that technology of learning add to our understanding of the new economy, the new interactive media, or the network society? Do we need whole faculties to defend our nostalgia for subsidised arts, "public service" media and "liberal" studies? What exactly are we protecting from exactly which philistines?

It's not just economic rationalists who need to ask what universities as a whole are for these days. Universities without global branding (like MIT) are already reduced to the status of bit-players in the production of knowledge. Public bodies funded primarily by government grants can't afford either R & D (compared with Microsoft) or basic "public' research (compared with Roy Morgan or A.C. Neilsen). Public policy formation is handled better by journalists (a 2000-word article on time) than by academics (a 2000-page report in two years). The "intellectual" has been supplanted by the spin doctor - and for good, practical reasons.

This isn't a calamity; it's our chance. Cultural studies can take a lead in modernising the arts and humanities, and in innovating new modes of research, criticism, teaching, and the commercial application of knowledge and creative content.

Australia can't afford too many posh universities. For the rest, it's necessary to cant the academic windmill round to face these winds of change. Universities can assist public initiatives to develop and diversify the economy in the creative/content sector. In return, governments will assist universities to modernise themselves. In the same week that the Weekend Australian was bewailing "university cutbacks," the Queensland government announced a grant of $15m to QUT for its new Creative Industries Precinct. The Commonwealth has since chipped in several millions more.

So the prospects are good for cultural studies, even in Australia. There's as much cause for cause for optimism and energy as there is for the more familiar gnashing of teeth. Universities need to redefine their role in a world where even countries are not big enough to go it alone. Cultural studies can help them to do it.

So we shouldn't lose our heads. We should poke them over the barricades and notice that the old adversaries - "philistines," "university cutbacks," "dumbing down" - are no longer the enemy. Instead of "brain drains" we should be thinking about how we can play a distinctive and useful role in the development of the creative industries as an important sector of the Australian and international economies. If we don't, the brains that will drain will be those of our students.

The postgraduate community in the School of Cultural Histories and Futures (SCHF) in conjunction with the staff from the SCHF, the Nepean Postgraduate research Committee (NPRC) and the Research Centre in Intercommunal Studies (RCIS) implemented a very successful series of integrated events throughout 1999. These included a national seminar series Alternate Dialogues, a national postgraduate conference Alternative Futures: Thinking Cultural Studies Beyond the Academy and an electronic journal issue of Continuum supported by the national Cultural Studies Association of Australia (CSAA) . These postgraduate development initiatives were made possible by funding from the Nepean Postgraduate Research Committee, the SCHF , the RCIS and the CSAA.

The theme Alternate Dialogues aimed to promote creative dialogue approaching questions of politics & praxis in cultural theory, with an emphasis on engaging with communities, spaces & discourses beyond the academy. Our speakers covered disciplines ranging from Anthropology, Art History, Psychology, English, Gender Studies, Sociology, History, Communications and Cultural Studies. The seminars contested established and emergent theory through an inter-disciplinary approach and were considered by many to be the most successful workshop series held by the humanities at the University of Western Sydney to date. In excess of 50 people turned up at each seminar and we were very gratified that interest was not only maintained but increased as the series progressed.

Each of the seminars included at least two Australian scholars 'in dialogue' with one another, with each keynote speaker's paper followed by an 'in-dialogue' session. The Alternate Dialogues Seminar Series was widely publicised around Australia with brochures, posters and a web site, and the audience came from a broad section of national and international institutions made up of post-graduate students and established academics

The Alternative Futures conference for Cultural Studies and related postgraduate students was held in conjunction with the annual national Cultural Studies Association of Australia conference Synthetics: Making and Remaking Culture, hosted by the School of Cultural Histories and Futures and the Research Centre in Intercommunal Studies at the University of Western Sydney, Nepean.

Alternative Futures focused on practical, political and pragmatic applications for cultural studies work and aimed to establish new ways of integrating academic learning and endeavours into a broader social context, for both the benefit of the community and in an attempt to renegotiate employment and career opportunities for post-graduate students. This was achieved by giving a platform for socially aware businesses, community and activist groups to debate issues relevant to the future of cultural studies in these organisations.

The conference aimed:

To explore employment possibilities for postgraduate research students outside the academy.

To discuss ways of linking the academy with the wider community, through collaborative research and other kinds of co-operative projects.

To investigate practical, political and pragmatic applications for cultural studies.

To provide an opportunity for postgraduate students, researchers and community workers to meet and make contact.

The conference was attended by between 80 to 100 people and was divided into three session. The day featured a variety of invited speakers who took part in one of several streams in the conference. Our international guest, Jane Starfield, a post-graduate student from Vista University in Soweto, South Africa was one of the keynote speakers. In addition, some very interesting connections and future collaborations were proposed. Helen Caldicot was to link up with Vanessa Wagner (Tobin Saunders) and Pauline Pantsdown (Simon Hunt) in the new year and dress as Kim Beazley to launch her new political party. We wait with bated breath!

The success of the above events was brought about by the overwhelming support of various sectors of both the national and Nepean academic community. The SCHF postgraduate students would like to acknowledge this support as it has assisted in building for the first time a tangible sense of community among P/G students and staff. We look forward to continued support for this essential component of academic and collegial development both within and outside of the university.

Ricardo Peach - Postgraduate Student Representative SCHF

Amanda Wise - Postgraduate Student Representative SCHF

Dr. Sharon Chalmers - Senior Research Assistant/Development Officer

T.J. Clark 1999 Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism New Haven, Yale University Press, pp 451.

Jonathon Crary 1999 Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture Cambridge Mass., The MIT Press, pp 397.

These are two very different books, despite the fact they are both histories of the same thing: namely, that 'moment' of art we have come to think of as modernism. For this reason, reviewing them together is apposite and not merely convenient. However, it is an explanation of how they differ that's needed here. Such an explanation, interestingly enough, will not turn on a argument about dates, as might be expected. Indeed, they are remarkably congruent on this typically sticky question. For Clark modernism begins with Jacques-Louis David, or more particularly David's (1793) Death of Marat; while for Crary it begins - as he established in his previous book (1990) Techniques of the Observer - with the scientific explorations in the area of perception undertaken in the 1820s and 1830s. Although a couple of decades is hardly inconsequential, it isn't this particular discrepancy on which the matter will turn. Rather it is the question of method that's vital.

What makes the question of method especially interesting in this instance is the fact that both authors claim to want to read modernist art in relation to its historical situation or context. So not only does it appear they are histories of the same thing, it also appears they share a common methodology. Of course, nothing could be further from the truth.

Crary's contention, vulgarly put, is that the great modernist artists of the 1870s and 1880s - he focuses on Manet, Seurat and Cézanne - depended on the experiments of people like Helmholtz and Fechner for their 'estranging' takes on the world. Clark's mordant reply, seemingly written in anticipation of Crary's book, is this: "Painting rarely dines well on the leavings of science." (215) For Clark, as his conclusion (which holds firmly to the ghastly thesis that fascism is modernism's ignominious end, quoting in grim succession Pound, Levi and Pasolini) spells out, history can never the be thought so bloodless. For Crary context is strictly an epistemological matter, whereas for Clark it is a matter of lived history. And never the twain shall meet, I feel I should add.

Now, although it isn't a tack I would take, I have to admit that I think it would be equally interesting to explore the extent to which these literally competing explanations of modernism are also inter-locking. The problem with this tack, though, is that it tends to elide the fact their whole take on art is deeply incommensurable. Nowhere is this clearer than in the one instance of apparent convergence. Indeed for a moment there, they seem to be saying the same thing. I am referring to their respective discussions of Cézanne. Sounding very much like Crary, Clark says "I want the reader to see Cézanne as belonging to the world of Helmholtz, Charcot, and La Revue encyclopédique." (165) But he qualifies it by saying he doesn't want us to see Cézanne as imprisoned within this world, but rather as extending its findings.

Crary can be seen to be doing the same thing, only better. He literally does read Cézanne as belonging to the world of Helmholtz, Charcot, and La Revue encyclopédique. His erudition on this topic is impressive, to say the least. One gets the feeling he has endeavoured to read everything available on the topic, from the strictly scientific through to the amusingly esoteric. His footnoted 'confession' that researching this book took at least a decade confirms what is obvious anyway. (13) But it has to be said, the massive amount of detail he provides does tend to imprison the reader, if not Cézanne, in this world. His argument, one feels, is compelling because it is suffocating. There literally is no room left for disagreement in his welter of information. By the same token, though, Clark's argument is at times unpersuasive because its wants for detail (the last chapter on Abstract Expressionism could be singled out in this respect). I doubt a balance between the two could really be struck since judgements of this kind are so personal.

Ultimately Clark's ambition with respect to Cézanne is to rehabilitate the brief cycle of paintings he did near the end of his life, the so-called "Bathers" series. His way of doing this, which intersects directly with Crary's own reading of Cézanne (although he concentrates on Pines and Rocks not the "Bathers" pictures - does this mean he too ignores the "Bathers" as Clark says Meyer Schapiro and Roger Fry do? [166]), is to read Cézanne in parallel to the scientific Freud, i.e. the Freud prior to The Interpretation of Dreams (an interesting implication of this, raised but not developed by Clark, is that too few critics recognise that throughout his career Freud tried to return to his scientific roots [151]). Clark lifts the following program statement from Freud's "Project for a Scientific Psychology" as his hermeneutic key to these late paintings by Cézanne:

This, Clark asserts, can stand as a kind of manifesto for Cézanne's "Bathers" because here, too, the human as the living embodiment of contradiction and confusion is purged in order to produce a more exact representation. Clark's conviction is that modernism wouldn't anger its many opponents quite so well as it does "if it did not so flagrantly assert the beautiful as its ultimate commitment. And if it did not repeatedly discover the beautiful as nothing but mechanism, nothing but matter dictating (dead) form." (167) Crary's view is never so darkly tinted as this. For him, Cézanne is a vitalist - this answers my question above: in emphasising the body, Crary would belong to the same mould as Schapiro and Fry whom Clark chastises for inflating the bodily in order to deal with the sheer inhumanity of Cézanne's pictures. (166) The world of science, which both agree is the proper background against which to view Cézanne's works, is for Clark devastatingly anti-human, while for Crary it is somehow positively anti-human.

But that isn't quite right either. For Crary the implications of the science that interested Cézanne (as well as Manet and Seurat, on Crary's telling of things) can really only be understood from the point of view of power. The changes in perception the scientists and artists of the early nineteenth century managed to engineer were rapidly recuperated by a state form and turned into instruments of biopower. In other words, despite looking and sounding like an instalment in the history of modern art, Crary's book actually has other fish to fry. Rather it is an attempt at a genealogy of 'attention'. Its method is precisely Foucauldian.

Crary's thesis, which builds marvellously on his earlier book Techniques of the Observer (enriching and surpassing that already impressively filigreed articulation of nineteenth century thought at every turn), is this: that mode of perception which we refer to as 'attention' is as thoroughly historically constructed as 'taste' is on Marx's view:

Attention, in effect, is not only a mode of perception, it is a mode of being too, that mode of being demanded of us by late capitalism. A fact that, as Crary notes, present moral crises about attention deficits in adults and children all too chillingly confirms. (35-37) My one major quibble with Crary's book is that it doesn't answer the obvious implication of this thesis: if modernist art can be read as contributing to the development of a mode of perception adequate to late capitalism does this mean it is also complicit? In the end, much to my dissatisfaction, Crary doesn't say whether art resists socialisation or intensifies it, whether it is culpable or laudable.

However, it is worth noting that this indecisiveness I am lamenting in Crary is in fact ratified by Clark's book, suggesting perhaps that the desire for a clear account of art's innocence or guilt is antiquated, or better redundant. Art is always both: it is never bloodless, but it is also never less than utopian. Even the fascists dreamt of a better world, no matter how many people they thought they had to exterminate to achieve it. What both these histories point to, in other words, is the dubious place ethics has in art history: the judgement of art has to be a question of the insight individual pieces afford us of our situation, not the intentions (noble or otherwise) of the artists. By the same token, then, the judgement of art histories has to turn on the question of how well they enable us to perceive and engage with the artist's dialogue with the times.

This is why I have suggested our focus needs to be on method. I would add, though, that Jameson's caution (in his book on Brecht) against fetishising method and turning it into an alibi for apolitical interpretations of texts needs to be borne in mind here, as elsewhere. As I've said, Crary's method is Foucauldian, to which I would add the following crucial qualification: it is the Foucault of Deleuze's interpretation not Dreyfus and Rabinow's, which is to say, Foucault the philosopher of history, not Foucault the jaded phenomenologist. This permits Crary to be at times more Deleuzian than Foucauldian without that slippage becoming structurally damaging: I am thinking here of his important critique of Foucault's notion of 'surveillance' and his rewriting of it in terms of Debord's 'spectacle' and Deleuze's 'society of control'. (72-6)

Although Crary toes the Foucauldian party line of a 'discontinuous history', I doubt it is fully discontinuous enough to suit Clark's taste. In Clark's view, modernism is a many-headed beast. It therefore needs to be tackled from several sides at once. Thus his picture of the period is built episodically, which should not be confused with 'discontinuously'. The difference is subtle but important: while neither mode admits to history being in any way progressive, as somehow marching toward a higher form or spirit, the episodic can at least to admit to the prospect of a conscious attempt on the part of artists to make changes, whereas the discontinuous can only see artists as impelled by forces not of their own making. We could clarify this still further by stating that whereas Crary's quarry is modernity, Clark's is modernism. Although such a schism is undoubtedly too blunt, it is instructive all the same because it maps out their respective trajectories.

The episodic structure of Clark's book enables him to focus on a sequence of moments, which he uses photographs to emblematise. And while his strategy is effective, it does tend to turn his history of modernism in general into something of a happenstance sequence of interpretations of pictures found in a private scrapbook: what is most provocative about this book, then, is what it can justify the least, namely the proposition that the photographs it focuses on are literally emblematic. And indeed, Clark claims this status for at least two of the photographs he hinges his thoughts on: a 1912 photograph of Picasso's paintings outside his summer villa at Sorgues and a 1920 photograph of an El Lissitzky 'propaganda board'. Clark says:

In the end, then, one wants to read these two books - Crary's and Clark's - together for the same reason: they seem to be like different sides of the same coin, or opposite ends of the same spectrum. Their interconnectedness is as interesting and as a complicated to articulate as the contrast between them. At any rate, a juxtaposition of these books such as I have contrived to present and argue for might serve as an effective way of kick-starting the modernity/modernism debate, an argument that has lacked for vitality, if not interest, for some years now. I would add, too, that such a juxtaposition might also serve as an effective starting point for a survey and critique of post-millennial thought. Is it accidental that in the last year of the of the second millennium two such monumental books should be devoted to the question of modernism? In this respect, the last word would seem to belong to Foucault: any history of modernity/modernism is always already a history of the present.

In the last issue of the CSAA newsletter, Mark Gibson prepared a report on postgraduate Cultural Studies in Australia. I found it fascinating. Partly this is simply good old-fashioned nosiness - I want to know what everyone else is up to. Partly it's professional interest - as the editor of Continuum, I'm always looking for research topics which interest me, so I can harrass people to give me papers. But mostly it'sbecause, in looking at such a list, one can see - in a very mundane and empirical and descriptive way - exactly what Cultural Studies in Australia is at the moment. For Cultural Studies is an approach which can only really be mapped by self-nomination: there is no body in Australia policing the boundaries of what counts as Cultural Studies, and this has never been a project in which the Cultural Studies Association of Australia has shown any interest.

From this perspective, it's encouraging to see the sheer range of projects which can be encompassed within Cultural Studies in Australia just now. Objects of study reported in the newsletter range from dance performances to sports journalism, from museums to autobiographical writing. Some are familiar to Cultural Studies (shopping malls); some are distinctly less so (discourses around the use of insecticides). There is also a distinct presence of topics with a policy edge - a sign, perhaps, of the naturalisation of the policy turn in Cultural Studies.

But it is also true that - for my own, purely selfish, part - I was disappointed to see how few of the topics seemed to be interested in areas that I would recognise as popular culture. Perhaps a recognition that the categories of popular and high culture are tricky to define has lead to a feeling that all kinds of culture can fairly be studied by Cultural Studies - a point of view with which I would certainly agree. This seems, though, to have lead to a loss of interest in studying popular culture - the same kind of exnomination by which gender-blindness continues the dominance of men, or colour blindness of white Australians. Many of the projects concentrate either on high art objects; or on the abstract object 'culture' as a whole; or on theoretical ideas themselves: taking the concepts of identity, subjectivity, or cultural value as their objects of study. And there is also a distinct presence - and this is what I want to comment on here - of topics which take as their object of study the writing of particular Cultural Studies (or Cultural Studies-appropriated) authors: studies of the work of Derrida or of Merleau-Ponty; of Irigray or Deleuze; Foucault or Baudrillard.

As I look back through the list in writing this, it occurs to me that maybe I'm overstating this point: perhaps I am simply reading the list through certain other recent experiences. And I have no wish to engage in the project of boundary policing mentioned above. And, of course, all I am going on in my analysis here is the titles of the project: a ridiculous way to assess academic work. In fact, I've almost convinced myself not to make any point here. But I've started so I'll finish, and hope I don't come across as adversarial, dictatorial, or ill-informed.

The point I'm trying to make can perhaps best be summed up if I explain my bemusement on recently reading Foucault's 'What is an author?', in the collection edited by Donald F Bouchard: Language, Counter-Memory and Practice. It struck me as particularly odd that this essay - which interrogates the notion of the originary genius author of a text, and proposes instead studies of author-functions as discursive products - should be collected in a book which explicitly takes Foucault's name to serve such a function: at least, that in such a collection, there is no sense of self-reflexivity about this fact. (Come to think of it, it is even stranger that the context where I first encountered this essay - in Paul Rabinow's eponymously named The Foucault Reader, does exactly the same thing). And so Foucault's essay - noting that the author-function serves purposes such as allowing texts to be classified into groups of presumed similar texts (an oeuvre) which can then be searched for meaning according to knowledge of the author's works and life, and valued accordingly - is presented as part of an oeuvre, through which Foucault's concerns can be read, and his genius (or 'the continuing vitality of his position') celebrated - even claiming to know what the author was thinking ('Foucault has come to discern ...'). Foucault's work is to be celebrated; even at the expense of ignoring his work in order to partake in this celebration.

Another anecdote - and indeed, another brush with Foucault - reinforces this point. A friend of mine, who drew on some Foucauldian concepts in order to write his Honours thesis on the use of images of childhood in televisual constructions of 'the public', was told off by by one of his examiners - and indeed, marked down a grade because of it - because he had not gone to the original writings of Foucault, instead relying on secondary accounts which disseminated and discussed his ideas. This strikes me as perverse in the extreme. To demand that students return to the original source of Foucault's ideas, and that they must understand properly what Foucault was trying to say, strikes me as oxymoronic in the extreme.

I am not trying to deny that some writers have been particularly important for cultural studies. Rather, I make these points simply because, for myself, I see far more interesting ways of discussing these people. Cultural Studies has a long tradition of writing on stars and celebrity on which to draw - from Richard Dyer's classic studies to the more recent work on celebrity by Australian writers such as Catharine Lumby, McKenzie Wark, David Marshall, Frances Bonner and Graeme Turner. And this seems to me to be a more interesting way of dealing with the celebrity of Foucault, for example, than a return to his work for more detailed analysis. Surely, if we've read 'What is an author?' it suggests that the way that Foucault's work has been taken up and disseminated in Cultural Studies is far more interesting that a return to the original texts for detailed scrutiny and re-reading? (which is not - of course - to suggest that this is what Foucault really meant; nor that he would agree with such a reading of the text).

Indeed, some work does take such an approach to the great names of cultural studies, seeing their status in the discipline as a discursive effect to be investigated, rather than a guarantor of greatness and genius to be worshipped (see, for example, Joe Moran's 'Cultural Studies and Academic Stardom' in the International Journal of Cultural Studies, 1,1, April 1998, pp67-82). Such an approach does not take the work of these writers as an object of study to be excavated, examined, studied as a literary text: but takes their importance in Cultural Studies as an interesting object of study. For me - but again, this is selfish - the work of writers such as Deleuze or Baudrillard only becomes interesting when ideas from their work can usefully be employed in order to understand or analyse other areas of culture. Of course, academic writing is a part of culture just as much as Burke's Backyard is - but it seems to get a disproportionate amount of our time in Cultural Studies: I have never come across a PhD which sought to find out exactly what Don Burke was trying to say in the December 1998 episode of his lifestyle program: popular culture is not treated in such a way, and I'm not convinced that the culture of academic publishing needs to be either.

This seems to have turned into a rant. It shouldn't have. Let me finish with a little bit of Lisa McCunishness. It's lovely to have so many people in Australia doing Cultural Studies. Of course, it's not all my cup of tea: I want to see more people doing more work on Australian television programs, internet sites (rather than medium theory, which seems to be well-served), more work on women's magazines, community newspapers, pub culture, surfing stories, group newsletters, martial arts lifestyles, street press and music journalism. But we have a new generation entering into a community of Cultural Studies scholars, and that perhaps is the most important thing.

The last CSAA Newsletter (April 2000), included a list of postgraduate thesis topics in cultural studies in Australia and New Zealand. The hope was that such a list might increase awareness of the kinds of work currently emerging in the field. The coverage was, however, quite incomplete (eg. nothing at all from NSW!). Since the last issue, further information has come in.

Australian Key Centre for Cultural and Media Policy

in association with the

BLUR & FOCUS

Community Broadcasting Association of Australia Conference

17-19 November 2000

Bond University, Gold Coast

The Community Media Research Workshop is an initiative of the Australian Key Centre for Cultural and Media Policy. Amongst other things, the Workshop aims to provide presentation and publication opportunities for researchers and research students active in the field of community media.

If you are currently an active researcher in community media, you are invited to attend and present at an academic stream of workshops being planned for the forthcoming conference of the Community Broadcasting Association of Australia.

Please forward an abstract of your proposed presentation, by Friday 15 September 2000, to:

Karen Perkins Australian Key Centre for Cultural and Media Policy Faculty of Arts Griffith University Nathan QLD 4111 Ph 07 3875 5350 Fax 07 3875 5511 Email: k.perkins@mailbox.gu.edu.au

For more information about the Community Media Workshop contact:

Christina Spurgeon

School of Media & Journalism, QUT

Email: c.spurgeon@qut.edu.au

Phone: 07 3864 1184

or

Tom O'Regan

Director,

Australian Key, Centre for Cultural and Media Policy

Phone: 07 3875 7323

For more information about the Blur & Focus Conference please visit the

conference pages on the CBAA website:

The University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia

Monday and Tuesday, 11 and 12 June, 2001

Confirmed plenary speakers:

This is the first of a series of biennial conferences to alternate between the University of Queensland and the University of Toronto.

Our focus is the testing of the borders between LITERATURE and/or MEDICINE and/or MUSIC, but we are equally interested in papers that consider ways in which any of these disciplines intersects with and illuminates a further discipline--architecture, art history, classical studies, cultural studies, environmental studies, geography, history, law, media studies, philosophy, psychology, or urban studies, for example. We encourage the crossing of period as well as disciplinary boundaries.

Participants are invited to address their own particular and current interdisciplinary interest/s, or to critique methodologies and theories of interdisciplinarity.

There will be three plenary meetings, accompanied by a number of sessions that will consist of three papers of twenty minutes each, with fifteen minutes question time.

We invite proposals for twenty-minute papers, or for panels of three papers. Abstracts of 250 words should reach us by email or mail on or before January 30, 2001.

For further information, please contact

Dr Judith Seaboyer and
Dr Jo Robertson

Department of English

University of Queensland

St Lucia, Brisbane

Queensland 4072

Australia

j.seaboyer@mailbox.uq.edu.au

Ph. 61 7 3365 2135 or

61 7 3365 2976

FAX: 61 7 3365 2799

Call for Abstracts Australian and New Zealand Communication Association Annual Conference: Transdisciplinarity

Conference website fully operational from 1st December at http://www-chs.ecu.edu.au/events/anzca/

Papers which address the conference theme of Transdisciplinarity will be especially well regarded, but other papers of potential interest and relevance to ANZCA are also welcome. Students and postgraduates without substantive academic positions are encouraged to submit their refereed

paper for the 2001 Grant Noble Award. The prize pays for travel and registration at the ANZCA Conference.

As with recent years the Perth 2001 ANZCA Conference includes two streams, a refereed stream and an unrefereed stream. Each of these has different requirements.

150--250 word abstracts, by email please to:

Linda Jaunzems, l.jaunzems@ecu.edu.au

In subject line please write ANZCA REFEREED PAPER

Grant Noble Applicants, please add (GRANT NOBLE)

Closing date abstract submission: Friday 22nd December 2000

Notification of abstract acceptance/rejection: Friday 19th January 2001

Submission of full paper for refereeing: Monday 19th March 2001

Acceptance/Rejection/reports on papers: Monday 16th April 2001

Final paper, in required template for publishing as per details on website

(tbc): Monday 14th May 2001

These deadlines are important; authors missing these deadlines will automatically be rescheduled in the unrefereed stream, and will be ineligible for the Grant Noble Award.

Papers accepted in the refereed stream will be published in refereed conference proceedings. We understand that such publication will contribute to the authors' Research Quantum (insofar as refereed publications continue to count). People who submit to the refereed stream may be called upon to blind referee two papers themselves.

Abstracts up to 150 words, by email please to:

Linda Jaunzems, l.jaunzems@ecu.edu.au

In subject line please write ANZCA ABSTRACT

Closing date abstract submission: Friday 30th March 2001

Notification of abstract acceptance/rejection: Monday 16th April 2001