Budding history warrior Mervyn Bendle returns to the op/ed fray today with a piece in The Australian decrying French theory. Apparently all would be well if baby boomers had stuck to good old Anglospheric empiricism rather than dallying with the risque notions of a fading Republique Francais. But you can read it for yourself.
I imagine that sometime soon, Dr Bendle will be explaining to us how he reconciles his condemnation of capital T Theory and particularly anything from France with an academic career built on theoretical papers informed by Foucault and Lacan.
But, anyway, the context for the op/ed is the establishment of a new American Studies Centre, an idea apparently inspired by Rupert Murdoch. Australian Universities are bidding for the gig and the funding that goes with it, and ANU Vice-Chancellor Professor Ian Chubb has been disturbed by a public threat issued by the Deputy Chairman of the entity set up to establish the centre, former Liberal Senator Michael Baume, about the inadvisability of anti-Americanism in research. You know, if you want your research funded.
Aside from the issues of academic freedom raised, Chubb makes a very good point:
He said about 50 per cent of Americans did not vote for their president but they weren’t called un-American.
“A handful of Australians say something about the policies of the President and they’re declared to be anti-American,” he said.
this is the sort of article that brings the worst out in me. It makes me want to be an intellectual thug or bovver boy for kicking the soft heads of those who have given up scholarly or academic pursuits of the intellectual for the green(back)er pastures of ideological complicity. Lets have a look at the last couple of paragraphs:
1) Australia and US are nothing alike. Any similarity is an effect of importing the commodities of the global-US cultural industries. The first big difference is a question of scale. Australia is the equivalenet size of a state of the US, not the US itself.
2)Australia is not a frontier society, that is not in the specific sense of the ‘manifest destiny’ thesis of US religio-patriotism born from the failure of European Enlightnement. Australia was an extension and expression of British power, now the Empire has simply shifted across the Atlantic.
3)Australia should be for agricultural protectionism. After the world has been colonised by US-led multinationals and their homogeneous crops sown from GM seeds, Australia could have the opportunity to keep itself free of these dangerous homogenising tendencies (dangerous in the sense of homogeneous gm crops can be wiped out easier than non gm crops).
4) The complete arrogance of this intellectual minnow is clear in the second paragraph with “global leaders” alongside the comment “our various minorities”. Some minorities of contemporary western nations come from nations that actually are driving the global economy, such as India and China. From the evidence of the growing ‘third world’ within the first world, the US and Australia are not egalitarian.
Amusingly, he should read some D&G to understand the difference between minority, minoritarian and majoritarian. Australia does attempt to occupy a majoritarian position in relation to ‘minorities’ who are actually not minor Australia in the slightest. Witness the deal made with China over natural gas, we might as well give it away…
Right wing politically correct thought police historical revisionist nanny staters. Exhibit no. #2448
Horrifying and yet not surprising. This government has been quite open for years now, across a number of areas, about its favourite ploy of withholding funding unless recalcitrants toe the party line. They seem to have completely forgotten whose money it is.
Jesus fucking holy christ…what are you all on about?
Another Kim, it’s become a favourite ploy in the Australian right wing that any time someone criticises anything about the Bush administration they are accused of being Anti-American.
Kim’s post title merely points out, as did Chubb whom she quotes, that somewhere around 50% of Americans didn’t vote for Bush and are fairly critical of his government: are they all Anti-American too?
Tig Tog- it is easy to read/sense/hear hate.
It’s not primary Kim saying…but it’s everywhere.
Paranoia? Nah.
iirc there was much more than 50% who didn’t vote for Bush, counting those agnostics who didn’t vote at all.
The first step in recovery is to develop a non-US concentric way of life.
Can you? Will you?
Really
Here
http://www.oxfam.org.uk/what_we_do/issues/trade/bp81_truth.htm
And here
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agricultural_subsidy
The US is opposed to other nation’s protectionism particularly the EU but as for itself?
OTOH despite our very own agrarian socialists in the National Party, our farmers get SFA in the way of protectionism, excepting of course for protectionist payments by the AWB to Saddam Hussein, (sort of indirect protectionism that little aberation.)
Australia is the meat in the sandwidge on this issue, between the US and the EU. To say that the US opposes protectionism given their laws which promote it, is clearly not correct.
I like America. I don’t like George W. Bush.
I mean contra glen and his US cultural imperialism stuff, where would we be without Buffy and Sopranos and Twin Peaks dvds to watch late at night?
That might be a Mark-centric comment though…
“Another Kim, it’s become a favourite ploy in the Australian right wing that any time someone criticises anything about the Bush administration they are accused of being Anti-American.”
This in fact is very true. Here is my example:
My definition of anti-americanism is that state of being where at every dinner party or social event you can smugly talk about cultural and military imperialism and denigrate a decent freedom loving democratic nation/people (yes even those who did not vote for Bush) in favour of some bunch of loopy murdering facists who want to dismantle everything decent and worth living for.
And commencing the diatribe with “I am not against America or the American people but the policies of the Bush government” is only apropos in that it matches the utter bollocks that inevitably follows.
Get it going on and fucking let everyone hate Australians, right?:
“Buffy and Sopranos and Twin Peaks dvds ”
And the entire 15 series of the West Wing. Doubly pleasurable for those of us who’d really quite like the US if it wasn’t run by an illiterate moron.
I find it goes well with a Pinot. And tim tams.
Yeah, where would anyone be besides defining themselves against us?
Get a life! MAKE IT! Dudes,change what you don’t like!
Go on! You’re Aus! DO IT!
I’m sorry, Sen. Baume, what’s wrong with free speech?
They didnt have “values” education when I was at school, so bear with me, im still catching up.
Well, Another Kim, the world could be measuring itself against Europe, like the US did obsessively for more than 100 years, and still hasn’t quite got over doing.
But don’t get me wrong. I endorse the emotion behind your last cri de coeur.
Any true understanding of anything has to be based on robust scepticism. To threaten to disqualify certain lines of enquiry because someone decides that they are anti-American, anti-Chinese or anti-anything is a negation of scholarship.
And who is going to make that call? Why, some Liberal Party hack placeman!
I’m as irritated as anyone by the smug ignorance of some comment from the Left about many aspects of US society and culture. It makes me grind my teeth.
But if the French can rise above being called “cheese-eating surrender monkeys” by some Americans, I’m pretty sure the many Americans I know and like can cope with soft, leftist drivel.
How knowledge and wisdom can be promoted by closing off any lines of enquiry is beyond me.
But here’s a warning:
The people that the US political classes have to learn to suspect are their purported friends. Look at the record of close military co-operation between the US and a conservative-led Australia in war — Vietnam and Iraq. In both cases Australian conservative leaders assiduously flatter US sense of military potency.
Not a good strike rate, is it?
Take-home message to the US political classes: if a Conservative Australian leader is suggesting a military adventure, run for your lives!
Not sure jest who ya’lls yalkin to LE..
perhaps it be thas poor ole brown tooth gal wid no edumacation and nothin else.
I am a pur Umerican and jes hATE a-RABS.
You KNOW how WE are
Destroy your own prejudices first.
Back to Merv’s article.
He still hasn’t got the tone quite right!
Yes – Anglosphere good, France bad, but:
Generationalism reference good, but the kiddies will be rooned by popular culture – BB and that pop music they listen to nowadays on pods or something is TEH GAY. We need more Homer and less Homer Simpson.
I prescribe regular re-education sessions conducted by Frank Devine, Keith Windschuttle, Kevin Donnelly and Christopher Pearson.
Or perhaps reconstruction as opposed to deconstruction?
What are the correct terms for recovering poststructuralists?
You were on safer ground when you talked about reinstating Saddam, Katz. Or was it reinstating Bligh.
The French cant rise above the derisory epithets because they are true, France has not won a war for ages, Sarkozy would argue that la belle france is looking like merde.
Word of warning,
* always maintain mobility and flexibility.
* exploit the inevitable.
* keep in with the outs and
* never stand between a lamp-post and a dog.
Get with it, rog. Jack Strocchi is currently advocating reinstating Saddam.
So French theory must be effete because their manly soldiers haven’t been winning wars? Whatever.
Read this comment and scroll down for responses:
http://larvatusprodeo.net/2006/07/17/the-road-map-to-war/#comment-113584
But remember to keep your irony detector turned on.
So, who is going to have Australia rise above all this and be the world power to take all the praise or shame?
We’d lurve to pass the baton.
Ready boys?
Just as soon as you vastly multiply our GDP and population (plus requisite extra water supply), Another Kim. No probs.
Mark, I will give you colloquial updates pertaining to popular culture, as we say here in the benighted states.
I just live here.
You all are the experts.
I have to vastly multiply your GNP?
Tonight?
Sure, I AM American and a woman but I’m a bit tired.
Can I do it tomorrow?
“Australia and US are nothing alike. Any similarity is an effect of importing the commodities of the global-US cultural industries. The first big difference is a question of scale. Australia is the equivalenet size of a state of the US, not the US itself.”
But we are very like California- what do you think Kim?
This may also help explain the affinity to US cultural imports. The beach culture , even the car and street machine cultures have great similarities I would guess. The shallow , brash trash culture .
“We need more Homer and less Homer Simpson.”
No, no the the way around!
Develop and export your very own trash culture.
It’s easy!
Then YOU can be hated even more than you are already, you brown nosers!
This is fun! I can hardly wait until the true lines of power have been taken over by Australians!!
Another Kim ,
We are there – you must have heard of Quiksilver , Roxy and Billabong.
And Australian movies, Rolf Harris and Dame Edna.
How could you hate us ?
Au contraire, mon ami.
I so adore your land. Been there and will be there again.
Bein’ mean back, that’s all!
Another Kim: ask any Pom about Neighbours. That’s the export of trash culture. This, otoh, which I understand is taking America by storm, is quality. And so is this – which also has the added benefit of being seen by teh right as very, very subversive and, as such, a Good Thing.
“Governmentality”??!
Gakk. this guy is an academic? He writes like a middle level public servant. He should be a shoo-in with Howard, Baume and co.
And I, like, so buy all that! Totally!
Mindless American robots march to buy whatever we see or hear of.
Programming input?
How about a war suggestion? We’re sooo open and ready!
I have so been subjected to the Wiggles,Phil. Have a small one.
Only redeeming aspect, accent.
James Hamilton:
Perhaps you had better widen your circle of acquaintences.
I have been and still am very critical of the bunch of crooks who cheated their way into the highest offices in the United States; wiped their arses (not “asses”) with Old Glory, the Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution; plundered the U.S. economy and then rushed off – without war plans and against the advice of their own world-renowned experts – into a madcap military adventure that has got a lot of good Americans killed.
I detest that fool Bush and all his clique and yet I get on very well indeed with regular Americans ….. so where do I fit into your scheme of things?
Mark, are you actually saying that Saddam should be reinstated or are you just agreeing with Jack S (not that it matters, both of you must have two dicks, cant be that silly playing with one)
As for the French, get with it Mark, they are losers peronified;. de Gaulle must be turning in his grave at this current bunch and their capitulations.
Kim, Another Kim and All:
This is 2006 and, given the rise and rise of France – and Spain, Germany, Poland, Italy and Austria, could it be that the stick-in-the-mud, last-century types in Anglosphere (especially in U.S. and its Trans Pacific dependency) are frightened of being made irrelevant by all those dreadful European thinkers?
According to Winston Churchills history of the english peaking speoples, the French ( quelle horror!) helped save the US revolution and so made America possible in the first place. Shit, fuck, DOH! and pardon mon French but who made the statue of liberty anyway?
I even hear that following St BARTs night (!) a lot French came over and settled in America.
Can we nuke them both now Sheik or is to late?
Take out Paris AND the pentagon. It’s the only way to be sure.
Err, no, rog, I certainly don’t believe that Saddam should be reinstated. Jack appears to, and I disagree with Jack (as I usually but not always do).
Well, I’m no defender of the current French regime, rog, but I wonder how it invalidates any academic work done in France. As far as I’m aware, there’s still good academic work being done in America despite George W. Bush being there.
Another Kim, thanks for the promise of cultural updates!
What about New Zealand?
Dunno. Their big cultural export is LoTR movies?
I rather enjoyed Seven Periods with Mr Gormsby.
Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes and Jean Baudrillard were the best post-WWII thinkers around the last time I checked (plus Umberto Eco — unhappily not French). And the French have the best cheese in the world. And most of the best films. (Not really. Hollywood does.) And the best novelists. And the best champagne. And the most mellifluous language. And the best accented English. Not so many of the great composers, but more than the Brits or the Americans.
Just sayin’….
What was that groovy NZ series on sbs a few years ago about some guy trying to make a film about naked people? That was fun.
I was born in New York City 35 years ago, and have been in Australia for many years.
I relinquished my American citizenship a couple of years ago, and can now proudly proclaim to be anti-American. I can’t envisage a more vacuous and obscene culture, and struggle to imagine who could possibly be interested in studying it.
Laura and Mark:
New Zealand – like Eire, Switzerland and Finland – seems to have an influence in the wider world out of all proportion to its size …. so …. I wonder what New Zealanders think of current and recent French thinkers …. and what they think of Michael Baume’s blunder?
I really don’t get this by Bendle:
IIRC the Left everywhere was being accused of anti-Americanism long before 1974, including the US Left. After all, back in the 1960′s the US was fighting its Indo-China wars. US flags were being burnt in the streets of Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne, not to mention Chicago, Washington, New York. The US flag has been burnt all over Latin America for decades, and in the MIddle East.
The reason we were burning US flags back then was the same as why they are being burned today. The US is the number one imperial power in the world and uses its military force to maintain that domination. I don’t know if the Union Jack has been burned in the past. It probably has been and for similar reasons, just like the French tricolor. And I certainly have a vague memory of seeing the French flag in flames sometime in the 60s. They were still ‘decolonising’ then – the FRench seem to still maintain a de facto empire over their old colonial possessions in Africa.
Thankfully, Australia will never be a world power. UNfortunately though we seem to be bedevilled by a fantasy of being the number 2 to whoever happens to be the biggest on the block, the loyal deputy. We were so for Britain and we even flirted with the USSR 40 yrs ago when the then (Liberal) gov’t was scared of China. But since WW2 we seem to be mainly obsessed with going all the way with the USA, mucking out in so many of its dirty wars, just like we did for Mother England (I remember as a child in the early 60s seeing not only WW1 veterans in Anzac Day parades but even Boer War veterans and veterans of the British reconquest of the Sudan)
As for French thought, I’ve never been a fan of Sartre (and he was all the rage back in my youthful days long before 1974) and Foucault’s intersting but.. However my favorites would probably be Irigaray, Kristeva and Simone Weil. And I confess I have only done brief forays with Derrida.
“Develop and export your very own trash culture.”
We tried AK, we really tried. You remember the prawns, surely? And, erm, koalas and Olivia Newton-John and MEL GIBSON!
oh I forgot to mention this was a cack:
Yeah, cause it is NOT called Theory! That is a bloody americanism!
mark, the only time I might be accused of mentioning US imperialism is the Empire comment, which was a joke (Empire has a machinic sovereignty anyway, according to N&H!). They have a cultural imperialism, though, as you indicate
That point was really targeted at his conflation of ‘frontiers’, which is simply wrong as Australia and the US have vastly different complex historical narratives.
Fair enough, glen.
Rob, the French have the best champagne?
Naah. The most expensive, yup. The most well-known brands, certainly. But not the best.
A suggestion for anyone who disagrees. Do a taste test sometime (eg at one of those rocking parties you left-wing folks hold). Take your Moet or Pol Roger or Veuve Clicquot or whatever, and compare to a taste of some of the more expensive Australian champagne (sorry, “sparkling chardonnay” or whatever they call it now).
The French champagne will seem relatively bland and flavourless. You’ll see!
P.S. This isn’t nationalism speaking — I’m actually a Francophile in general.
P.P.S. Getting back to the subject of this thread, Dr Bendle would evidently enjoy working at this new American Studies Centre — and how nice of The Australian to print his job application!
Well I’m certainly confused. Possibly the most anti-American thing I can think of, would be suppressing contrary viewpoints. (well I guess technically it’d be un-American, but still.)
For the record: criticizing America is not, and cannot be, in and of itself, ‘anti-American’. As with all the other zany ‘antis’ and ‘phobes’ out there, criticism is only harmful when it becomes rigid, irrational, hysterical, unrealistic, biased, and reflexive. In a word, when it becomes French.
Like any other large, powerful, slow-moving object, America should be criticized early and often. Just don’t expect to be right all the time… especially if your criticisms are shown to be rigid, irrational, hysterical &c. But don’t let that stop you! At its best, the country is one big ‘suggestions’ box.
w/r/t the academic angle, there’s a delicious irony here, hiding as a secret-decoder-ring prize inside the box of cultural cereal. If one broadly considers the history of Western academia over the past, say, 150 years, one can’t help noticing that recent (read post-1940s) generations made great strides in identifying and criticizing the hidden zany biases of earlier times (which were frequently based on notions that were racist, sexist, colonialist, or simply incomplete). What’s hilarious is that these same folks then nullified a good bit of their early achievement, by then simply uncritically installing a bunch of equally zany biases of their own, to replace the ousted ones. People who notice this and point it out, are apparently called ‘reactionaries’ and other amusing names. Eh bien, la vie continue…
Just to get back to America briefly, for a moment. I noticed a lot of folks above in the thread using the ‘manifest destiny’ angle. Talk about your limited master narratives! ‘Manifest destiny’ was a simple-minded trope even in its heyday; yet now of course it is used as a cat’s-paw with smug, chin-stroking certainty by its ideological opponents, who would like to show that its ‘narrative’ is ‘imperialist’ and other assorted demons; when the inconvenient truth is more like ‘narrative? what narrative?’
This business of talking about America in the vocabulary of ‘empire’ is quite simple-minded, and really should have stopped by now, at least amongst intelligent folk. It carries on mainly because ‘empire’ is an awfully handy brick to throw, and also because no one can be bothered to come up with new vocabulary to address what is clearly a new situation. I’m reminded of the Romans exploring/conquering the Near East for the first time, and coming across all sorts of fruits for which they had no names back in their agriculturally-less-diverse home country. So they kept calling everything new, a variation on “apple” (pomus) which was the only useful word they had. A fig was a “Lebanese apple,” an apricot was a “Syrian apple,” and so forth. [Much later on, of course, a potato got a hilarious moniker in French.] Get a proper grip on your imperialist rhetoric, folks; it’s long since turned into apples vs. oranges… or should I say, apples vs. Florida apples.
Rob: “…And the French have the best cheese in the world… And the best novelists. [??!!] …Not so many of the great composers, but more than the Brits or the Americans…”
I dunno, Rob, depends on how strict your usage of ‘composers’ is. I’d argue that the Western art-music tradition of the 20th cent. mainly belonged to jazz, and I’d also argue that there’s no particular contradiction or distinction between jazz and the Western art-music (read ‘classical’) canon.
Bear with me, folks: this is a bit of a bee in my bonnet, but I may actually have a point. Basically, I think that the crisis of 20th cent. art music, at an early date, resolved into a problem posed by two distinct camps. The problem was: the tradition seemed to be stagnating — what was the cause? The two camps were Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Alban Berg etc. on one side; and on the other side, (largely unnoticed by the first) were Louis Armstrong and Jelly Roll Morton and their pals.
Schoenberg and friends thought there was a crisis in tonality itself (notwithstanding the S-man’s famous remark about the key of C major), and sought a way around what they thought was the straitjacket of traditional tonality; whereas Satch and Jelly could see that there was nothing wrong with tonality per se — the cure lay in an expanded approach to rhythm and dynamics and timbre; but chiefly in rhythm.
The results were obvious: after ‘Verklarte Nacht’ Schoenberg’s ticket was pretty much punched, and so were his buds’. Nobody really listens to ‘Moses und Aron’ or ‘Lulu’ with a straight face anymore; but ‘Rhapsody in Blue’ and Ellington’s work were quite vital and needed little formal apology, even as they were every bit the equal of the Euros. Rhythm, man. And theory of attack. This culminated in the 40s — 60s, as Bird and Monk and Miles and Coltrane became, in effect, the great art-music ‘composers’ of the 20th cent. (pace Dmitri Shostakovich), but went into a steep decline by the 70s, since this vein could only be mined for so long. The great weakness of jazz is its structural simple-mindedness, which is why no great operas or Masses were composed in a jazz idiom, and the ‘symphonic’ works of guys like Marsalis are pretty much ridiculous. Nothing lasts forever.
Which brings us round to the Minimalists, but that phase lasted even shorter… The main point being, from a 20th cent. point of view, that the Continent was simply not Where It’s (or Was) At. Not that it won’t be again some time in the future. A century’s a pretty short space of time to take a breather. Maybe they just needed to lie fallow for a spell.
All is One, eh?
Paulus and j-p-z:
I would like to shout/spring you a beer each …. no, make that a glass of native New England vine wine or a glass of tasty mead made by that Danish migrant with a winery outside GinGin in Queensland, Australia.
Oh no, that’s never happened before, has it? Surely not.
Hooray!! Somebody has noticed that there really IS an America outside Hollywood, The White Whourse, NBC-CBC studios, NYSE and a tiny clutch of factories (cunningly disguised as universities) which produce bigoted academic hippies hardwired for obfuscation and funds-squandering..
Veuve? There’s your problem, Paulus. Pol Roger very good though. But you have to try Roederer, Krug or Dom P – or all three if you can. We (Oz) make some very fine sparkling white, but it doesn’t compare, for mine. (Even the very good Tassie ones like Jansz or Pipers Brook)
Our sparkling red, on the other hand – now there’s a world leader!
Actually, some of the French non-vintage champagnes are very good – and much more reasonably priced. Try Mumm.
Anyway, is Greg Sheridan turning anti-American?
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,20876,19997745-25377,00.html
He argues that John Howard sets the agenda for the US-Australian alliance, not George W. Bush…
All I can say is- Terry Lane!
Shhhhhhh, be vewy vewy quiet…
Obs, you’re starting to get weird again, dude.
Weird Hint: ‘I fell for it because I wanted to believe it’- Terry Lane
“This is 2006 and, given the rise and rise of France – and Spain, Germany, Poland, Italy and Austria, could it be that the stick-in-the-mud, last-century types in Anglosphere (especially in U.S. and its Trans Pacific dependency) are frightened of being made irrelevant by all those dreadful European thinkers?”
I’d say that was a compelling point except I won’t give you “rise and rise of France – and Spain, Germany, Poland, Italy and Austria” at least not all of them and there is an implication that they are a homogenous bunch. I’ll say this in their favour, they hate each other. And they know better than me why this is a wise option.
The Americans do political history much better than Australian writers. Everytime I go into Sainsbury’s bookshops in Melbourne I find fantastic stuff such as the other day: McGirr’s Suburban Warriors. Australia could learn a lot from the US in this academic aspect.
James Hamilton:
This is late 2006; the countries I mentioned gave up hating each other a generation ago (apart from England-v-Italy and Germany-v-Poland football hooligans).
These countries are certainly not homogenous but each of them has an an increasingly dynamic intelligencia. Better start learning to debate in Spanish, French (hear that Massa Bush?), Polish, German or Italian.