Cultural Studies

This handsome volume purports to be an ‘overview of the current state of social-science research about Australia at the beginning of the twenty-first century’. Its editors have assembled a broad, if less than representative, group of specialists, most of whom comment on aspects of one of three fields declared, by editorial fiat, to constitute contemporary social science: economics, political science, and sociology. While acknowledging the immense diversity in the social sciences, the editors briskly assert that ‘the majority of universities in the advanced societies and the majority of the academic staff who work within them, are organised around, and identify themselves by [these] disciplinary labels’.

Sydney, as everybody knows, is Australia’s world city, always has been. It offers the urban metonym – Opera House sails – which, together with Uluru, is Australia to the outside world. And it generates, or generated, a particular kind of intellectual, the Sydney larrikin, rogue male. These books claim to cover two such, Bobs Hughes and Ellis. How might we receive them?

Cultural criticism at the end of the twentieth century, says Darren Tofts (at the end of 1999), is suffering from a kind of amnesia. Interactivity is not an invention of Playstation games or electronic mail, but has been a crucial constituent of avant-garde art throughout the century: neglect this history and risk collapsing culture into fin-de-siecle, commodified monotony. Both those who rhapsodise and those who malign the anarchic non-linearity of current hypermedia as if it is an unprecedented cultural phenomenon ought to recall, Tofts advises, Marcel Duchamp’s bewildering, ludic work of art, The Large Glass: The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even. Hypertext archives and libraries, he notes, are only now beginning to manifest the scope and complexity of James Joyce’s textual systems. Hypermedia, Derrida once observed, simulates ‘joyceware’, and Tofts adds that it has ‘a lot of catching up to do’. Indeed, hypermedia is a term that he considers far more descriptive of the radical artistic inventions of the modernist vanguard in the first half of the twentieth century than of our contemporary ‘interactive culture’.

McKenzie Wark had the good fortune to ensconce himself in media studies just when those who once would have busied themselves with Stendhal or John Tranter began to envy his terrain. And his various journalistic gigs, notably his column for The Australian Higher Education Supplement, give him the advantage over other academics of being able to cobble together a book every year or two. Or, as he puts it, ‘Celebrities, Culture and Cyberspace is a book that was written in its own peculiar way, as a series of experiments with fitting events and ideas together, conducted in public, through a wide variety of print and electronic media.’

One hardly knew where to look. There were breasts everywhere. Not dozens of them mind you. Just two. On Mistress Sabine. The left mammary with a disturbing blue vein running over it, seeming to fill half the room on its lonesome. Other bits and pieces of the Mistress bulged alarmingly around the inadequate constraints of her leather fetish outfit, threatening to break free completely as she tied up Linda Jaivin and administered a paddling at the launch of the author’s Confessions of an S&M Virgin.

We have been blessed in this country with an oversupply of spiritual writers – analysts of and speculators about the spiritual dimensions of our life and culture. We have had a certain amount of history and pop sociology about the Australian temperament and character and much cultural cringing and self-laceration, but not much about the Australian ‘soul’. This is an odd situation since much of our recent literature – Patrick White, Rodney Hall, A.D. Hope, Judith Wright, Les Murray, Vincent Buckley, Kevin Hart, the later Helen Garner – is deeply concerned with affairs of the spirit and not just with manners and affairs of the heart. Again, there is a large interest in spiritual issues in Australia, no doubt some of it rather dotty or flaky in a Californian mystical kind of way, but a good deal of it real and serious, though disenchanted with what the ‘institutional’ churches have on offer.

Tourism is, I suppose, the quintessential postmodern activity – I’ve been to Bali too. This particular tourist, Gaile McGregor, described as a ‘Canadian itinerant scholar’, offers us EcCentric Visions as part of a trilogy; the previous two titles featured Canada and the United States. The link is, she says, that all three are ‘post-frontier societies’. It’s a definition that depends on whether or not you’ve got past the post.

An ancient grammarian who had pondered Horace’s remarks on whether a good poem is the product of natural aptitude (ingenium) or acquired skills (studium) opted for ingenium and produced what was to become a much-quoted aphorism: poeta nascitur non fit, ‘a poet is born, not made’. His privileging of ‘nature’ over ‘art’ is favoured by those anxious to preserve the mystery of poetry by deriving it from an inscrutable faculty called ‘genius’. Others, eager to unscrew the inscrutable, favour the rival and demystificatory claim that poets are made, not born, which enables human interventions to overcome biological determinism.