I’m having an interesting time trawling virtual and dusty papers from that fun period of 2002 - 2006 when immigration detention activism was all the rage. Do any readers know of/have any critiques from that time (within loosely ‘anti-detention’ activism/debates) regarding the work of groups like ChilOut and the Circles of Friends?
Young Liberals making recordings of lefty lecturers: do they really think we can’t tell which ones they are? Or will they perhaps disguise themselves in faded surf brand t-shirts a lá the undercovers at the G20 protests?
Put another way - this guy generally stands out in a Political Economy lecture:
(NSW Young Liberals President - from the Daily Telegraph article on the same issue)
“Say about deconstruction, these international Web sites welcome and juxtapose extremely serious discussions, or ones that are publishable, and then chitchat that is not just dreary, but also without any possible future.
(It is true, and don’t let’s ever forget it, that that can also happen at conferences and in journals, academic and otherwise).”
- ‘The Word Processor’ in Paper Machine, p.32
Back in Australia, back at uni, I slide into a second day in the desk chair and feel my re-institutionalization clicking over. I take heart from Meaghan Morris, 20 years ago in The Pirate’s Fiancée (1988, pp.8-10), a collection penned from her interstitial point between the ‘popular’ and ‘academic’ writing worlds:
“… the experience of moving between a number of different social sites of debate and discussion about cultural politics has also left me very cautious about some aspects of recent attempts to come to terms with the limitations and specificities of ‘academic’ practice.
On the one hand, Foucault’s notion of the ’specific intellectual’, for example, has been particularly useful both in allowing institutional struggles to occupy a field of ‘everyday life’ rather than being relegated to an ‘ivory tower’ divorced from a ‘real world’ and in making it possible to criticize the moment in which a theory ‘mistakes the liberal academy as the collective subject of a universally useful knowledge’ [quote from David Bennett, 1987]. Feminism has both profited from, and helped to produce, this kind of reconceptualization of academic politics. On the other hand, something slightly different seems to be happening when it becomes possible to claim, as Paul Smith does in an essay in Men in Feminism, that post-structuralist feminist theory ‘however “feminist” it may be, and howsoever “feminist” is construed - does not exist outside the academy‘ (my emphasis). Smith stresses in a note that he is referring only to what is known ‘in the academic vernacular as feminist theory (the structuralist/poststructuralist variety)’.
…
One must be passionately careful here, precisely because to state that a given activity has ‘no existence’ outside one’s own immediate sphere of operations is to accept and reinforce as absolute, rather than to challenge and transform, prevailing local conventions about the available places from which people (and in this case, feminists) can be allowed to be saying something. (…) [W]hen we begin to come to terms with this development it becomes impossible to claim that a given theoretical activity ‘does not exist outside’ the academy. This can only be true in an academy imagined as without students who do not proceed to become professors, or with students who remain untouched by their own working experiences.
Furthermore, this academy functions in a world without bookshops, without ‘amateur’ readers and writers of theoretical work, without theorizing artists, without those ambiguous ‘art-world’ figures (critics, and especially curators) who can frame artists’ work as ‘theoretical’ whether they wish it so or not, without TV chat-shows and intellectual talking-heads, without interviews, without media jokes about semiotics and poststructuralism, without private reading groups, without public forums, without young film-school graduates making both small film-essays and big blockbusters, without other than academic audiences for any of these, or anyone anywhere to go on to make something different from them: it is a world without any ‘dissemination’ of ideas, and finally without the rampant commodification of thought and feeling that makes it possible to speak of ‘Theory’ - in a vernacular sense - as a practice, as a problem, as a genre, and as a ‘zone’ of possible contestation.
…
Without worrying about the disconnections and failures of intellectual work, we cannot transform it politically. Yet one of the most important consequences of the notion of the ’specific intellectual’ is not to translate specificity as ‘confinement’, but rather to begin to accept firstly that work produced in an academic context (even the writings of Foucault, even poststructuralist feminist theory) can be used and rewritten in unpredictable ways (and various media) elsewhere: and secondly that this movement can run the other way: academic theorization can and should transform its practices by learning from the experiences, the concepts and the methodologies developed by people in broader social and political movements.”
Please stop talking to yourself constantly. Please. Please stop moaning and sighing and tut-tutting. Do you want attention? You seem to be in constant crisis. You jangle my nerves with your continuous distress. Please turn your mobile phone onto ’silent’ as it is always ringing. Please. Your ring tone is a hideous polyphonic mass of clanging muzak and it makes me want to die leave the room.
I don’t want to speak to you to tell you this. You are always angling to start a conversation that I fear will never end. I don’t have time to get into a conversation about your life. I want to work in silence. I’m most terribly grateful for a permanent space to work in but I am TRYING TO WRITE MY THESIS and my capacity for thankfulness, generosity, compassion etc are lower at the moment. I’m sorry that you can’t use a computer and you obviously have issues that require you to be constantly waveringly yelling down the phone and you seem to have been writing your PhD for about ten years and you have a lot of filing on backlog but OGOD PLEASE COULD YOU PLEASE JUST STOP IT KTHXBYE.
PS As for you, please stop it too. Thx.
PPS Of course this is related to the ostensible content of my blog. Here we have an example of the limits of deliberation.
As I stare down the exhiliration-tinged-with-terror of another International Travel Extravaganza, I also seem to be staring down multiple other emotions, close to the home (of three years) that I haven’t left yet (and will be absent from for less than three months). In travelling to another continent to fuel the final stages of my thesis (which will constitute my licence to practice intellectual life, or some conclusions about how to practice this life in the most aware and connected way, or a piece of tragic claptrap from a self-absorbed nerd head, depending on your viewpoint); I seem to be inconveniencing, disappointing, and downright hurting a number of people whom I love, as well as feeling the peculiar weight of privilege tug at my heart (as opposed to my purse strings).
I’m reminded of Mel Gregg’s reflections, from a while back, on contending with this chosen reality when it means that “we will need to move a long way from our family and friends to live according to the values and habits we’ve been taught (are worth losing all this for) in grad school, and to begin to imagine a shared ethics with which we can challenge those who’ve been part of this privileged world a lot longer than we have.”
Rather than join this guild after finally ‘achieving’ entry into it, perhaps I should just move to the South Australian countryside to farm chickens, feed cats, and watch over my family and friends. At the moment I just watch the conditionality of the words I write ricocheting off the universe I send them into. I do wonder sometimes what the point really is if I can’t use it to pierce the walls that surround me, thick with expectation.
*the content of this post may or may not have something to do with the bottle of Lindemanns (from the bottle-o bargain) Bin currently located next to my laptop.
“Is the university politically important? Yes. At the same time, we don’t want to become so concerned with university conditions, the conditions of our own work and the nature of our own environment, that these come to stand for the political world. (…) it seems to me that universities and colleges over the last thousand years have always been awful and wonderful places. Academic conditions through most of pre- and early modernity were hardly fecund for either creative thinking or politically uncensored work. (…). The history of the university has never been one of radical freedom or egalitarianism, non-exploitation, non-hierarchy, or anything like that. Au contraire. Remembering this might allow us to seize the possibilities we do have, as teachers who can still say pretty much what we want in the classroom, teach pretty much the texts that we think ought to be taught, write pretty much the books that we think ought to be written. it’s worth remembering this at the same time as we do critical political work on the deadening, politically exploitative, and increasingly managerial characteristics of the university.”
- Wendy Brown, ‘Learning to Love Again’, Contretemps 6, January 2006, pp.39-40.
Ordinarily, I avoid academic conferences with the burning hot mis-ana-thropic passion of a thousand suns. This was the last one I attended. However, I am tripping back onto the circuit next semester. I make an exception because (a) it is multi-lingual, which potentially reduces opportunities for irritation, i.e. if I can’t understand some of the papers and (b) it’s in Overseasia.
I don’t ask for much.
Powered by WordPress
