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October 15, 2003
Last night I wandered through the almost empty streets of Adelaide. It was a glorious warm night. But there were so few people out having fun. Those I saw were were wearily making their way home from work. Where was the fun crowd? Spring was in the air. It was a balmy night.
I was on on my way to the philosophy jammm to hear Peter Poiana from the Department of French Studies at the University of Adelaide give a talk on Marcel Proust's monumental Remembrance of Things Past.
When I came home from the jammm I had planned to do lots of online research, write a big post on this literary work, and explore the idea being in search for lost time. But then I chanced upon this experimental online visual work tokidoki.it courtesy of notes from somewhere bizarre. It is very, very classy graphic design and illustration that is full of games. Try this game. The website is made in Italy by a media designer at vianet.it who loves Japanese culture.
Italian design and Japanese imagery. Now that's globalization for you.
The juxtaposition of Proust and tokidoki.it got me thinking. I realized that last night I had stepped back to the beginning of the 20th century when France was the centre of the avant-garde, literature ruled, the novel was king and print culture was the centre of our world.
Today it is a visual culture that rules. We are surrounded by images in our visually saturated culture to the extent that our daily life is lived with an ever shifting visualscape. Few people read poetry, the novel is pretty much dead and who goes to the theatre regularly? And experimental work will increasingly be online. tokidoki.it is more visually interesting than a lot of work being produced for the walls and floors of art galleries.
It is a huge shift from a print to a visual culture. It is a fault line that demarcates the 21st century from the 20th.
That shift is not really reflected in Australian weblogs. Visual semiotics and design literacy are fairly low key whilst critical commentary on our visual culture, as a place where meanings are created and contested, being almost non-existent. The webloggers have yet to take the visual turn that everyday life has already gone through.
Then I chanced upon some remarks made by Brendon Nelson----our trendy Minister of Education. He wants Parliament to grant him the power to to cut funding to controversial tertiary courses and PhD research topics, such as subjectivity, textuality, ethics and pleasure.
Subjectivity, textuality, ethics and pleasure, you ask. What does that mean? Try this:
Our groovey Minister does not like us acquiring visual 'literacy', or learning how to critique those advertising images that manipulate our unconscious emotions to leave us worse off. He says that we are far better off putting the taxpayers money into more lawyers, teaching and veterinarians.
Notice the big silence about Proust.
Now Minister Nelson spends a lot of energy circulating pictures of himself hanging out with kids who are full of spontaneity and joyousness. These show that Brendan Nelson has lots of street credibility. It's called spin and it's message is designed to silently slip into our subjectivity so that we feel warm and cuddly towards Minister Nelson. The minister is playing the same game as the advertising industry.
The Minister's dismissal of PhD research into subjectivity, textuality, ethics and pleasure indicates that he is living in yesterday's world. He reads yesterday's papers, is surrounded by yesterday's people and has yesterday's ideas.
Subjectivity, textuality, ethics and pleasure. We need lots more research and courses on that in relation to our visual culture.
Update
A brief account of the Proust talk at the Philosophy Jammm mentioned above can be found here. Scroll down.
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Nice spin.
You could argue that what we really need are courses so that people could critique those misleading blog posts that leave us worse off.
I must admit I remain to be convinced that our groovey Minister is so far off the mark.
He isn't actually arguing that universities shouldn't be allowed to study such mysteries as the sexuality of Jesus or Nicole Kidman's divorce. He's just arguing that the taxpayer shouldn't have to fund such esotorica.
Now let's consider the ALP's response.
"Dr Nelson is giving himself carte blanche to cut public funding to university courses according to his whim," Ms Macklin said. "What is or is not in the nation's interest is entirely up to him."
Now, as I understand it, we elect a government so that they can determine what actually is in the nation's interest. Dr Nelson is the minister in charge of the education portfolio, so he is strictly speaking the fellow who SHOULD be in charge of determining what is in the nation's interest.
Like I say, a nice post, and nice spin.