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September 2, 2003
As much as I admire, and welcome, the shift in culture studies away from the old modernist concern with high art to popular culture, I am uneasy with some of what passes for culture studies.
From what I can make out social democrats and greens pretty much defend what is left of the old capitalism/liberalism/nation-building welfare state project. They do so in order to rescue civil society and the experiencing subject from a revolutionizing neo-liberalism. What we have here is the changing material configuration of power and reality in the twentieth century: a reshaping of society.
Those in cultural studies joyously deconstruct tradition, convention, nationality, politics and culture. They are enthusiast cosmopolitians in the global village, and have an ironic perspective on things. They are about a historical cleansing, a getting out of the modern and new beginnings. That is how some understand cultural critique.
Yet it seems to me that in doing this cleansing those working in cultural studies are giving neoliberalism a helping hand. Is not a neo-liberal mode of governance deconstructing Australia's social democratic modernity in very radical ways as it endeavours to make it historically irrelevant and forgotten? Where does cultural studies stand in relation to the materiality of power as a mode of governaning a country?
Where is the critical edge of cultural studies to a neo-liberal mode of governance? Where is the critical voice to the way it is reshaping the nature we inhabit.
The core of my reservation is this. Cultural studies celebrates the culturalization of nature--natuer is a cultural construct. Fair enough. We see the Murray-Darling Basin through historical eyes and undderstand they way humans have produced it. Yet we also have an environmental disaster in the basin and the looming spectre of biotechnology. Yet cultural studies' concern with the text----the environmental crisis on television---is - at the expense of the natural (ecological) processes and tendencies in the basin (eg. dry land salinity).
I do not see much rethinking of the culturalization of nature amongst those working in cultural studies. Should they not be doing so?
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Profits are what is left after expenses.
Once per capita income rises above about $3,500 a year environmental concerns start to get attention. The higher above that figure the more attention.
Making people do what you want at the point of a government gun sounds so 20th century.
Surely you can do better than that?