At the root of much culture wars talk is an opposition to the overthrow of the high culture/low culture distinction – you know you’re on this terrain when columnists start raving about teh evil postmodernist Maoist teachers privileging comics over Chaucer or equating Big Brother and Shakespeare. In fact, the disruption of the notion of high culture has very little to do with postmodernism (you won’t find Derrida discussing Marvel comics – he was too busy writing about Mallarmé), but that’s a tale for another time. But, in order to get around the fact that a respect for pop culture was in origin a democratic impulse, and opera or symbolist poetry a pastime of status elites, the culture warriors have to claim that the kids in the aspirational burbs are being unfairly deprived of the great heritage of Western Civ. In their downtime, perhaps, they’ve been watching The Simpsons, as some new research suggests.
It’s been a while since I’ve read the late French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s classic Distinction (and he was no postmodernist either – the basis of his study being survey research). But it’s interesting to reflect that the bourgeois taste he was writing about is as much a thing of the past as the working class culture celebrated by some of the original doyens of cultural studies such as Raymond Williams. That should come as no surprise to culture warriors, who under other circumstances, would be celebrating the death of class.
The Independent reports that Tak Wing Chan and John Goldthorpe from Oxford have released the results of a cross-national survey of cultural taste:
“We find little evidence for the existence of a cultural elite who would consume ‘high’ culture while shunning more ‘popular’ cultural forms,” the two Oxford academics said, when their results were published yesterday. “There are certain individuals who fit this description, but they are too few in number to figure in any survey-based analysis.”
I’m going to try to get hold of the study itself (which I’m suspecting is an attempt to test Bourdieu’s findings some decades on) before commenting further, but I think it does point very strongly to a conclusion that the terms in which the debates around the politics of culture and cultural politics are conducted are totally disconnected from (post)modern reality. I think it also points to the deep incoherence of the culture wars argument. Wouldn’t it be interesting if there were no “luvvies”?
Oh dear
The army of ‘cafe latte unwooded chradonnay political correct bisexual lefties” is just that. However Gerard Henderson et al DO exist. Damn.
as for me
leftie..tick
bisexual..tick
latte..ewwwwwwwww
unwooded chardonnay… EWWWWWWWWWWW..
and I love simpsons, futurama and even South Park!
mm not ‘is just that’ meant ‘does not exist’.
how the hell did I do that.
But, in order to get around the fact that a respect for pop culture was in origin a democratic impulse, and opera or symbolist poetry a pastime of status elites, the culture warriors have to claim that the kids in the aspirational burbs are being unfairly deprived of the great heritage of Western Civ.
Through the 18th and 19th century, opera was very much a popular pastime, and would therefore seem to reflect (accepting your argument for the moment) the democratic impulse. At the birth of opera by Monteverdi and the Camerata, the model used was ancient Athenian theatre, which – of course – was also a popular, democratic artform.
Opera gradually became seen as an elite artform in the 20th century, but this was a gradual change, as reflected by the popularity of stars such as Caruso, or on-screen singers such as Mario Lanza, or, indeed, the American musical in its heyday.
Apart from the debate on Aboriginal Studies, the pointless ‘History Wars” and the right wing complaints about public intellectuals like Philip Adams,and the occasional piece of rubbish in the Australian I haven’t followed this debate too closely. I’ve always thought it was a bit of a straw man created by the Quadrant circle to prop up Howard’s determined subversion of academics, history, the ABC, etc in his attempt to create a right wing cultural elite in his own image.So far as history is concerned its a pointless nuisance distracting from the real business of history – the study of the recorded past. Its not the left’s fault that the Libaral Party in the past did not have as strong a sense of the importance of creating a political mythology as the Labor Party had and has. And its the task of the historian, whether academic or popular to bust that mythology and come up with a semblance of what most likely happened. The culture wars are a political construct, designed for political purposes, ie propaganda. Political parties have always behaved this way – the Athenian version of history, Whig history, etc.Perhaps if Howard had bothered to take notice of Croce’s dictum that all history is contemporary history, he might have realised the futility of what he was trying to do. But then again, he’s probably never heard of him, and he wouldn’t have been sympathetic to someone who had fought Fascism anyway. But accuracy in any intellectual, or for that matter, political argument was never one of Howard’s strong points.
TimT, you make a good point – as with other institutions, “elite bourgeois culture” and “the Canon”, are artefacts of a finite period in recent history rather than eternal verities.
It does look like they’re trying to track down Bourdieu’s ‘Knowledge Class’. The disjunction between wealth and status has always been very British, although it may be changing now (Britain has home renovation shows and rich plumbers too).
Mark quotes:
That rather proves the right wing Culture Warrior’s point. If only cultural elites did stick to high-culture, rather than mucking in with the prole low-culture in a gruesomely chummy way then we would all be alot better off.
The cultural elite occupy the commanding heights of the cultural economy. But they waste a good part of everyones time and money on expensive displays of nonsense. Rather than acting as taxidermists of nearly extinct cultural forms, which is what we tax-payers are paying them to do.
This is because real cultural elitism requires years of intensive study, knowledge of musical notation, latin tags, foreign languages. All of which is too hard. Much easier just to wank on about Madonna.
In any case these surveys of cultural activity quoted by Mark are a waste of time. A category mistake because they miss the point of the cultural elite tag.
The phrase “cultural elite” is a anthropological, not epistemological. Cultural elites are not especially intelligent or knowledgeable about any forms of culture, whether high-, low- or no-brow.
No one takes much notice of post-modernist art any more. It is understood that it is an offensive joke designed to drum up business amongst the ill-educated yobs with too much money and not enough class who seem to frequent advertising agencies. Very non-U.
Rather cultural preference is now used as an elite status-markers to indicate possible personal, professional or political networking opportunities. Such as frequent name dropping of nauseating French post-modernist charlatans at over-rated cafes. A well-versed art in the Rive Gauche precinct and now even Brisbane, I here.
These cultural appurtenances are all ideological hood ornament used to decorate ones platform in the endless status-war between the upper- and lower-middle class: the inner-city apartmented, childless, uni-attending black-clads versus the outer-suburban McMansioned, child-ful, TAFE-attending red-necks.
I will not bother quoting cultural elitist mating calls chapter and verse. No doubt we are all too famiilar with the writings of the Deveney’s and Hutchinsons of this world to stomach another dose.
Mark “fails to include” the key quote which proves my point, that I have been banging on about for about 900 years:
And one can utilise the “cultural elite” classification to predict a large variety of political opinions. As has been done by the competent sociologists down at People and Place . The relationship between New Left cultural elites and Old Left cultural populus is of critical importance in the alignment of political forces on the Left. Betts exposes the ideological tension on the Left:
In the early noughties I predicted that the ALP would lurch to the Cultural Right in order to stem the flow of lower-class votes to the LN/P. Sure enough they did, with Rudd now embracing martial law in indigenous communities. The ultimate cultural conservative “me-too”.
Mark’s cultural criticism would have more credibility if he made some empirical predictions based on underlying theory, which later got confirmed.
To reference another cultural movement, Jack: Less is more.
In keeping with the theme of the thread: lol pwnd!
Jack Strocchi wrote:
Gee I’m glad I don’t live in that country Jack. It sounds hideous. I assume you’re ranting about that country known as “Straya” I hear a lot about on the TV, where Shane Warne lives.
10 David Rubie Jan 4th, 2008 at 1:22 pm
Yeah, Warnie. A familiar face at MoCA openings.
Of course cultural elites exist! It’s just that it’s hard to define them.
Actually, no, no it doesn’t. If you’d read Mitford at all on “U and non-U” (what?), or your Bourdieu on how ‘taste’ is created and transmitted.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to have a Carlton Draught®, a brand I drink solely because of their use of Carl Orff’s ecclesiastica-in-advertising. Self-referentialism? It better sell some bloo-dy beer.
Jack, it’s well known that Warnie’s Mum is German. What is less well known is that from an early age she instilled in him a love of Wagner. In his autobigraphy he tells ther story of rushing from cricket practice to catch the VSO’s performance of Tristan and Isolde.
This immersion in high culture had a lasting effect. Warnie used to hum The Ride of the Valkyries to himself as he ran in to bowl.
Ive found Warnie much more interesting since learning he’s half German.
I salute Spiros for reading his book.
I gather that puts you about one book ahead of Warnie already.
Oh, and who can forget the English poet laureate’s most famous contribution to *their* high culture? (I’m not kidding):
George Formby, take yer ‘at orff.
I don’t believe Mark has correctly summarised the point of the “culture warriors”. He seems to think that Kevin Donnelly et al are saying:
1. Cultural elites all worship traditional high culture.
2. Boys and girls, it is fit and proper for you to follow what the cultural elites do.
3. Therefore, study Homer, not Homer Simpson.
I think rather that the “culture warriors” are simply asserting that traditional lit is intrinsically more worthy of study than pop culture, and yet pop culture has supplanted and displaced traditional lit in our schools.
The latter is the interesting point. One hears many claims by anecdote, but has anyone seen an empirical study on what is actually being taught in our english classes, and how it has changed over recent decades?
Mark
Derrida was a poststructuralist, but not a postmodernist, sweetie.
I hope this helps.
[Psst, JG, this thread was tailor-made for the word "luvvie", and I hope you will take full advantage of the opportunity!]
Mark
Wouldn’t it be interesting if there were no “luvvies�?
Indeed! Damn Howard and his anti-revolver laws!
Paulus
I most certainly will not! If y’all think y’all can just push my buttons, use and abuse me wily-nilly for sport, y’all have another thing coming.
In a spasm of solidarity with both my proletarian roots and my modern-day Luvviesphere, I henceforth will refuse to use the Luvvie on this thread! 
Mark
While otherwise thanking you for this for-too-long suppressed vital debate, I must inform you that your understanding of what the Culture Wars actually are about is somewhat, er, idiosyncratic?
I’m well aware, John. But the culture warriors either aren’t or find it more useful to construct a monstrous horde of postmodernists. Btw, I think “post-structuralism” itself (which is not a term in use in French scholarship) is a fairly useless category that lumps too much in the same basket.
Alas, wrong on both counts, JG.
Göring never actually made the quote about revolvers and Kultur—it’s apocryphal—and Howard’s post-Port Arthur gun laws apply only to weapons which have semi-, full-automatic or pump-action capacity.
Having said that, seeing you and Jack Strocchi on the same thread, the most powerful handjobs in the world, the question I’ve got to ask myself is do I feel lucky? Well, do I?
Strocchi vs. Greenfield would out-stoush Alien vs. Predator. Make my day.
Paul Burns
While we have had overwhelmingly civil and productive discussions about history/iography over the past few weeks, I must correct you on one vital misunderstanding under which you labour. The History Wars were without question started by the Far Left, and have now taken on the significance of religion for the poor dears such as the truly loopy Curthoys Crazies.
Having said that, seeing you and Jack Strocchi on the same thread, the most powerful handjobs in the world, the question I’ve got to ask myself is do I feel lucky? Well, do I?
Strocchi vs. Greenfield would out-stoush Alien vs. Predator. Make my day.
That is the funniest shit I have read here for weeks. he he he he.
Must say this is a nice cultural development – a pub deciding to get rid of its pokies.
http://www.theage.com.au/news/national/peturbed-publican-punts-his-pokies/2008/01/04/1198950053971.html
Next time I’m up Brissie way I’ll have to make sure I go and have a drink or two, just to show my support.
Yes, great comment, Mr Hogan.
Poor Greensleaves, the more he tries to impress, the less he succeeds; while the more Strocchit writes the the less he makes sense.
“Strocchi vs. Greenfield”
It would be like Steven Segall v. Jean Claude van Damme.
The universe will implode!
I think you’ve misunderstood me, Gaz and Adrian. I wasn’t trying to be abusive; I’d be genuinely fascinated by an exchange of views between the two. May God and the locomotives of history save me, I’m truly a slave to stoush.
Well, this could be an object lesson for JG in his attempts to improve his writing and argumentative practice for uni. Summarise Jack Strocchi’s argument succinctly.
Mark
Much as I adore the presence of Herr Strocchi, the assignment you have set me is FAR too advanced for me1
JG,
Well, how come I wasn’t in the trenches?
JG, I acknowledge Australian historians of all ideologies engaged in debates about feminist studies, Aboriginal history, womens’ history, class history, environmental history, Labor history, various aspects of economic history, immigration history etc., but for the most part these debates were civilised, if sometimes heated debates.(Try discussing Bligh, MacArthur and the Rum Rebellion with the differing sides and see how heated it can get, or various aspects of the Botany Bay Debate – which, by the way, the convicts appear to have won.)It wasn’t a war. It was passionate historical debate. And if you can’t get passionate about history, you shouldn’t be studying it. There were and are similar kinds of debate going on re 18c English history and American Colonial and Revolutionary History, but it was never a war, by any stretch of the imagination. The Quadrant Circle and JWH turned it into a “War”, which, by the way, most of us dismiss as irrelevant, albeit we lament the damage it has done to public perceptions of the history profession – false perceptions I might add.
Actually Kevin Donnelly is most definitely an advocate for the lower orders, NOT the elite.
Paul Burns
You were not in the trenches because you did not defect to the enemy postits. This is why you and I can productive discussions about history.
Actually, JG, the fact that you’re now talking about the history wars goes to the confusion about what “culture” consists of in these interrelated domains. Historiographical controversies are in fact only tangentially related to questions about the canon or subsidies for art or whatever.
…except perhaps in some sort of Arnoldian sense.
That’s why Strocchi’s comment would in fact repay a careful reading to identify all the conflations and elisions that he needs to make (consciously or unconsciously, I don’t know) in order to keep his ideas minimally connected. As with a lot of conservative arguments, the culture wars talk is far more emotive than rational, and it withers under logical examination.
Mark
You are correct that we can usefully separate the Culture/History Wars. I was merely being polite and responding to Paul Burns’ earlier conflation. But you are presenting only one vanguard in the Culture Wars, not the Wars themselves; the establishment of CultiStudies in the universities and Critical Literacy in the schools.
JG,
One or two of my right wing tutors would severely disagree with you, especially when it came to my undergraduate views about R.G. Menzies.I really blotted my copybook there. (since slightly amended, but only slightly amended, by more intensive postgraduate study, and then only for his first Prime Ministership.)
By the way, what’s a postit?
Point. As they’d have said on the Western Front, when you’re in a hole, keep digging it longer.
As for the so-called Australian ‘History Wars’, as Anthony Smith said about broadcasters’ battles, the critical discussions aren’t between historian and audience, but historian and Government.
With a change there, we should expect it to get All Quiet all of a sudden.
John, the establishment of cultural studies in Universities and critical literacy in schools are actually also only tangentially related no matter what Kevin Donnelly thinks.
PB
Postit is my convenient abbreviation ofr postmodernist/structuralist
Tend to agree with Paul Burns – the ‘culture wars’ debate was a bit of a straw man in the Howard era.
Personally, in an Australia where I can’t even reliably put enough food on the table for three days out of every fortnight, I don’t give a stuff about these so-called wars.
Mark
I think I have made it pretty clear I do not pay any attention to Kevin Donnelly, Gerard Henderson, Robert Manne, Hugh McKay,Phillip Adams, Piers Ackerman, etc. They make me want to hurl my cookies. Having lived in the UK and the US and experienced Cultural Warriors – of all hues – at their finest, returning to Oz (which I nevertheless love) was like returning to The Land That Time Forget: an epithet my friends have sent around the world!
They make one ashamed to be Australian, because they are so DUMB and cannot write. WTF are they STILL doing holding onto all that valuable media real estate?
I read the first few Donnelly effusions, after which I thought “OK. I got that. Nothing more to see here. Move on.” I find his conflation of marxist/feminist/green/psotit/blah to be extremely unhelpful. When I did the old-fashioned pre-postit 2 year NSW HSC Modern History syllabus in the 1980s, we learnt all about Marx, socialism, trade-unions, Tolpuddle martyrs, suffragettes, colonialism as a cause of WW1, economic tensions between agricultural/slave capital and industrial capital as cause of US civil war. I even have friends who went to Cranbrook, who had very sophisticated explicitly Marxist approaches to these topics.
In English I read “Cry the Beloved Country,” “Chant of Jimmy Blacksmith,” “Coonardoo,” “Things Fall Apart,” blah, blah, blah.
So to be told by Donnelly that left-wing history and literarture are new to schools is just (thankfully) bullshit. OTOH I equally loathe the Cultural Literacy crowd who think we were all saps sodden with false consciousness before they put fricking Clueless on the HSC syllabus.
Mark
While I think Herr Strocchi is a very, very cluey bloke, he can obviously type extremely quickly, and my little ADD-addled head can only give the occasional missive the attention it deserves.
That’s been done, JG. First as tragedy by Mark Davis, then by Ryan Heath, as farce.
clarence girl
Aaaaaarrrrrgghhhhhhhhhhhh….Repeat After Me! Howard was a PARTICIPANT in the Culture Wars, not The Wars themselves. Howard is now gone – good riddance to bad rubbish – but do you think that will make one iota of difference to what I read in academic journals from History to Psychology this year? Not on your nellie!
silworm
I think on this particular issue you will find more than a few willing to temporarily abandon their pacifism and contribute to the cavalry.
I suppose I was asking for it, with my provocation about “luvvies”, but very little of this has anything much to do with the subject of the actual post.
No, Sunshine, it’s only you.
“very little of this has anything much to do with the subject of the actual post.”
And unfortuntately far too much to do with John Greenfield, who has the unhappy ability to turn any discussion around to his favourite topic – himself.
Only because other people talk about him, adrian.
One would not expect to find the survey findings from Bourdieu’s Distinction conducted in 1960/70s French society replicated today in Australia. They did, however, assist in establishing a problematic around the interests and capital involved in cultural differentiation. The process was always dynamic with various social groups ( not necessarily whole ‘classes’ ) enjoying a capacity to appropriate different cultural forms and styles in a way that distinguished them – cultural capital converted into symbolic capital. Part of this involved developing and asserting “new” readings of – and interest in – popular cultural forms.
Of course since then one of the many key changes has been the emergence of the forms of representation and communication enabled through web 2.0, intensifying the capacity (of some) for cultural representation.
Interesting question Mark!
John Frow, Tony Bennett and Michael Emmison applied Bourdieu’s methods to their own study of Australian taste & judgement in ‘Accounting for Taste’ (1999). From what I remember, Bourdieu ‘found’ that the French education system was a machine for reproducing cultural capital: effectively reproducing the French class system through training in the skills of cultural taste, like how to appreciate impressionist painting.
What Frow et al found was that the Australian education system was less a machine for the creation of cultural capital than it was for social capital – who you know is more important that what you know (That’s how I understand the distinction between the two).
I’m not suggesting that Frow and his colleagues drew the right conclusions from what also might have been a flawed methodology, nor that the conditions at the time of their surveys have not changed. But, what’s interesting, to me at least, is that if social capital, rather than cultural capital, is more at stake in the Australian Education system’s pedagogies of taste, then those skirmishes in the culture (& history) wars that were focussed through panics about postmodern curricula could be seen as contests over social capital. I’m inclined to believe that what Kevin Donnelly, Keith Windschuttle and various other public intellectuals intend is the re-forming of social capital through an education system that is governed for the economic elite.
Off thread but Malcolm Knox’s novel ‘Jamaica’ bears out this thesis: the sort of taste that an expansive education in Sydney (at least) produces is for elite sporting contests and knowledge of the finer distinctions of class at the top-end of town.
Make expansive – expensive in the last sentence.
Mark, if not for debating the dominance of cultural elites from the right or the dominance of the religious right from the left, what would bloggers do with themselves?
Read some Dickens, apparently.
I don’t know, Matt, talk about something interesting? I’ve always pointed out that there is no “dominance of the religious right” in Australia, much as some lefties might like to think so.
Indeed, Barbara, as I noted with regard to the dissolution of the classical bourgeois ethos. It would be interesting to know if France were one of the “six other countries” included in the survey – but I agree with you about the way Bourdieu framed some very important questions.
Ag, also been a while since I looked at Frow et al, but one only has to think of the self-reproducing elites found in some sectors of professions such as the law and how their status and careers are founded on a GPS and a sandstone education to think they’re on to something. I also suspect that their study provides further evidence that all this tosh about “luvvies” in Australia has never reflected anything real. Second rate appropriation of American themes – the cultural cringe writ large in the op/ed columns and their fellow travellers in the blogosphere.
Hogan, I tend to think that Goering actually did say “When I hear the word culture I reach for my revolver”. This would have been a borrowed expression however, as he would have picked up the gist of this anti-intellectual jibe from a play he attended with is comrades. The saying is a notion designed to suck up to rednecks, like the term “egghead” in the US and “intellectual” in Australia as in “Are you some sort of intellectual, mate ,are ya?”
Goering would have most probably picked up the phrase from a play Schlageter by a Nazi suck-up writer Hanns Johst, which was written on the Nazis’ accession to power in 1933 and performed on Adolf’s birthday. The phrase “Wenn ich Kultur höre entsichere ich meinen Browning!” (Whenever I hear of culture… I release the safety-catch of my Browning!) would have borught down the house in an auditorium full of Nazis and I can envisage Hermann slapping his fat thigh on hearing this one.
Newsreel from 1945 of Goering giving himself up to a US officer in Bavaria shows him clearly handing over his personal sidearm, which was a revolver.
This leads me to believe that it is quite plausible that he used the phrase on occasions, particularly as Rudolf Hess also used the phrase except for vhe last bit: “Wenn ich “Kultur” höre, nehme ich meine Pistole”.
But the real question is, Hogan, is JG subtly identifying himself with the sentiments of the audience at the premiere of Shlageter on April 30, 1933?
Mark, this post and the article it linked to were interesting in their own right. However, I still fail to see what relevance they have to any Australian “culture war”, real or imaginary.
The key finding was: “Class, as opposed to status, does not seem to have much effect on cultural tastes. … Doctor Chan said: “Our work shows it’s education and social status, not social class that predict cultural consumption in the UK.”
Fine. But of little relevance to Australia, where class is much less distinct than in the UK. You know, toffs vs oiks/chavs, Eton, Oxbridge, BBC English, etc — we have nothing like that here. (In fact, I think class is non-existent in Oz, but that’s probably a debate for another day.)
The “culture warriors” are not saying that “the kids in the aspirational burbs are being unfairly deprived of the great heritage of Western Civ” for some class-based reason, rather that it’s due to recent changes in educational fashion that marginalise the traditional canon. The article does nothing to gainsay that thesis.
Paulus, I’d disagree with you fundamentally that class is absent in Australia. It doesn’t need distinctions such as titles or “received pronunciation” and in any case both are falling into desuetude in England without any lessening of class influences on life chances, or in terms of social stratification generally.
As to the relevance, I’m trying to point out two things:
(1) The ideal of the “cultured” person to which apparently everyone in our wonderfully democratic society has a right to aspire to does not in fact exist (anymore);
(2) The culture wars talk is and has to be incoherent. On one hand, “luvvies” conspire to keep culture to themselves while dishing out pap to the masses, while on the other truly cultured gentlefolk like all our friends the op/edders are on the side of the people.
As to status and class, since the study’s been co-authored by Goldthorpe, he’s no doubt got a Weberian take on both. But actually the argument doesn’t change much if you substitute Weberian class for Marxist status.
Paulus “…of little relevance to Australia, where class is much less distinct than in the UK. You know, toffs vs oiks/chavs, Eton, Oxbridge, BBC English, etc — we have nothing like that here. (In fact, I think class is non-existent in Oz, but that’s probably a debate for another day.)”
This is hysterical. Lessee…
The clipped speech of the urban well-heeled versus the stereotypic rural drawl.
Geelong Grammar versus Armpit-of-the-Universe High.
Group-of-8 Uni versus Dawkins or no Uni.
Multiple generations of Beazleys, Creans, Downers in politics.
“Aspirationals” who think that the 20-foot high front porch and wall-sized plasma screen show that they have made it, versus a Directoriate born of the already-rich, who seem to have no jobs other that to sit part-time on the boards of multiple companies and be paid several thousand per hour for it (if you don’t believe me, buy some shares, get the annual report, and check out the directors’ bios. When did these folks ever not be a senior exec or director?)
The late Kerry Packer paying $32 in personal income tax one year, and blowing multiple millions of somebody’s money on the tables in Vegas the next.
Yeah, sure, we don’t have class in Oz!
Those with normal jobs and normal levels of investments/savings, who worry how to pay off that few k on the credit card and associate with other people who have normal jobs and finances, live in a different universe from the old-money and lucky-few-entrepreneur types who mingle with senior professionals and apparatchiks, and never ever have to worry where the next few tens of k are coming from.
This is a nepotistic society (but aren’t they all?) in which your parents, their connections and yours, and the combined purchasing and negotiating power of your immediate tribe are nearly everything, and anything else really is a battle.
But education/culture/values correlate only broadly with wealth/status/power. The culture wars were always a smokescreen to divert attention from the real business of reducing mobility and opportunity. And phony-egalitarian levellers-down on the nominal Left are just as guilty of that as the totalitarian/feudal nominal Right.
Well argued!
AndyC’s on to something here but he can afford to be a little more nuanced.
Take the clientele of a major Public School, for example.
Fifty years ago virtually all the fathers of pupils at such a school were either bosses running their own concerns or members of the learned professions — lawyers, doctors, engineers.
Today a much smaller proportion of them are what we might call capitalists. Many more of them are senior management for public, often multinational, companies. In other words, they are members of the salariat. Often well paid, but salary earners nevertheless.
Moreover, today a large percentage of the clients of that major Public School (maybe 10% to 15%) are children of South East Asian refugees. These refugees often landed in Australia with nothing more than the clothes they wore. These people see this major Public School as a means to upward economic mobility. Their dreams of of the learned professions. And being tractable children, disproportionately that is where many find themselves at the end of their secondary schooling.
This major Public School now has a clientele that contains fewer ex-students among its parents than at any time since its foundation, meaning that the hereditary element of attendance at this school is less prominent now than at any time in the past.
Thus, the old stereotypes of Mr Fat, the local exploiter of labour, or the major grazier do not reflect the current reality of class in Australia. Very few Australians can be significant capitalists any more. We live in a branch-office economy dominated by multinationals. The landed gentry have almost disappeared. But on the other side the learned professions are more open to diverse entrants than ever they were.
Katz: your post, and particularly the last para, are absolutely spot on!
AndyC: I went to the oldest Anglican private school in Adelaide. One of my classmates was the son of the Anglican Archbishop. Others were rough-as-guts farmers’ sons.
Some could speak ‘posh’. Others had a vocabulary largely consisting of 4-letter words.
Some became professionals or businessmen; some joined the public service or academia; one (I kid you not) became a deck hand on a fishing boat. Some are now unemployed.
How can anyone make out of that melange any conclusions as to class?
Is it just a case of speaking ‘nice’? Or a function of income? Or wealth? Or what exactly? If you were devising a test or statistical analysis that related class to other variables, how would you define precisely what class a particular person belonged to?
Remember that class, as one would have observed it in 1920s Britain, involved much more than income or wealth. If you were a member of the upper class, you might have gambled away the entire family fortune in Monte Carlo, and be now broke, but people would still treat you as upper class regardless. There is no equivalent of that in modern Australia.
And if you think that the right has some evil secret agenda of, and I quote, “reducing mobility and opportunity”, go see a psychologist to get that paranoia treated.
Andyc
Word.
Paulus,
I like English Marxist EP Thompson’s notion that class is less an inherited or institutional substance – it’s a relationship. For Bourdieu social relationships are not just structured by income and wealth (economic capital), but also by symbolic, cultural and social capital.
Whether we are still talking about class differences if we are no longer talking about differences in wealth and income doesn’t alter the force of something like class differentials operating in Australian society.
But still, Ag, for the concept of “class” to be meaningful to a social scientist, it has to be capable of definition.
Imagine if you were a research officer and the Prof came in and said, “I’m doing an analysis on how class correlates with educational achievement. I have here data from the ABS on 10,000 individuals. Their educational level is easy to classify. Now, I want you to work out how many different classes there are in modern Australia, and specify the cut-off point between each class.”
How would you begin? How would anyone be able to make sense of a diverse and fluid mix of “income and wealth (economic capital), [plus] symbolic, cultural and social capital”?
Basically, “class” is now simply too vague to be meaningful.
There is class division in Australia, but I doubt it can any longer be categorised as working class, bourgeoisie, ruling class. The only Marxist category that is easily recognisable nowadays id the lumpenproletariat, or as the Americans call it, the underclass. If one wants to categorise people by class, probably income or geography are the only reliable indicators. Where you really get into trouble is when you try to fit culture into this. There are plenty of middle class homes where there aren’t any books, and plenty of working class homes where there are heaps. And I’d argue books are a good indication of culture.But then maybe not. The most successful bestsellers, apart from novels by Bryce Courtenay, are cook books and books by and about cricketers, according to recent surveys. Even crime novels are pretty low down the list. Its probably impossible nowadays to categorise some-one’s class by the football code they follow or club they belong to, (Manly excepted.)But it was possible to do so, probably as recent as the 1950s. Given the difficulty of tracing cultural interests to a particular class, its probable you could argue that if there are cultural elites, they’re everybody’s cultural elites, in which case, logically, they’re not elites.
It’s been done, Paulus, and many times, in empirical studies. There are a number of ways you can do it – you can look at self-identification, which tells you one thing, income/wealth, which tells you another, and relations to the means of production (ie business owner, professional, employee) etc, which tells you yet another. And no doubt other axes which would tell you something else. There are a number of very large studies done in Australia using not just ABS but a range of other data (eg HILDA), and large scale surveys (some longitudinal). A research officer would know this – and a second year social science methods student should be able to answer the question.
I should also mention that there are a number of studies I’m aware of which operationalise Bourdieu’s categories using Australian data.
Paul – actually you can get some meaningful data on social inequality by using standard Marxist categories – I should look up one study done on Australian women which is fairly illuminating actually. I hasten to add that you don’t need to accept Marxism as a politics in order to see this, before the sceptics jump in. The degree to which class cultures exist or collective class identification in a sense that meaningfully affects behaviour and attitudes – which is something I allude to in the post – is much less than it once was. As Ag was suggesting though, the born to rule mob know who they are, and what makes them different.
Well okay, Mark, I’ll take your word for it. The thing that still puzzles me about “class”, though, is the lack of definitive signifiers that are obvious to an onlooker.
Where exactly would you place the Geelong Grammar old boy who self-identifies with the upper class, has a mid-level income, and whose relationship with the means of production is an employee? The answer, I suppose, is: depends on what definition you’re using.
In the old days — at least as far as I can gather from historical movies and novels! — you could quickly and easily place someone into their class position upon meeting them. Not so now, evidently.
In any sufficiently complex society, strata are pretty much always going to exist; but that’s not really the same thing as “class.” Class is a kind of slippery notion, especially when you’re comparing different societies, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be talked about at all, just that one should try to chew slowly and take very small bites.
It might be helpful to keep in mind that class isn’t a monolithic construct, it’s subject to a lot of variables. Two important ones, I’d say, are the degrees to which various class boundaries are permeable or impermeable (is there a fence? if so, how high? and is it electrified?), and the odds or probability that a given individual of given capabilities can move across these barriers, and with what level of ease. The example that Katz gives of the children of Asian refugees attending elite schools in one generation is interesting because it shows that certain barriers are indeed permeable (which doesn’t prove they don’t exist), but that individuals with different qualities will have different levels of success.
A perceptive person could probably give pretty good odds on any given individual’s chances for class mobility in a given social setting, just by talking to that individual for a good half an hour or so and knowing what the likely obstacles might be. Also keep in mind that plenty of people are relatively content with who and where they are in life, and that this too has a bearing on the formation of strata, independent of the notion of class.
Perhaps the novels and movies are simplifying a bit, Paulus! If you read Trollope, for instance, or Dickens (I’m reading Bleak House at the moment), you can see a constant anxiety about and need to reinforce class distinctions – even from those who were the most class-y and distinguished. There was arguably more class mobility in 19th century Britain than there is now – though a lot of it was downwards or slightly upwards rather than big leaps (which are extremely rare in any age). But you just need to think of the way in which the children of the industrial revolutionaries were raised as little ladies and gentlemen, and of the fact that (if I recall correctly) the Guinness clan got ennobled in three different lines. The whole way the British aristocracy functioned was to absorb moneyed individuals and incorporate them within its fold – and Churchill’s dad wasn’t the only aristo looking across the Atlantic in the late 19th century for an American heiress – within a few generations, it shouldn’t matter much if you were the fourteenth Earl Arundel or the second Viscount Northcliffe. I use the latter example because the phrase “press Barons” was originally meant literally.
As to your example, that’s why the concept of status is useful as a supplement to that of class. But on that point, I’d also endorse a lot of what A Plate of Shrimp has to say.
“depends on what definition you’re using”
Which doesn’t detract value from class analysis, but rather adds to it. Remember that class is most useful in aiding insight to social interactions – it helps you see who is exploiting who for a particular frame of reference. People being exploited at one level will be the ones doing the exploiting at another after all.
This is worthy of consideration.
Certainly there are many examples of interlocking directorates at the top end of town. These are the chaps and chapettes who have standing in the business community and their status extends out into the broader community of leafy suburbs, discreetly luxurious resorts, the right clubs and perhaps a charity or two.
But these chaps and chapettes are the non-executive directors on company boards. There is no doubt that membership of the right boards provides cache, enhances influence, and perhaps aids a little insider trading to keep the best fruit on the well-polished sideboard.
However, in terms of actual remuneration, usually it is the executive board members — the CEO, the CFO, the production manager — who make the big money. And they are employees. And until they retire they are hardly ever on more than one board because they are working 90 hours a week keeping their own company afloat.
Let’s go to the other side of AndyC’s divide.
Often the aspirationals that AndyC mentions are self-employed tradies who have transformed a good business sense into a profitable business. These chaps tend not to be employers in the traditional sense. Instead, they do their work with and through an interlocking network of sub-contractors. Sometimes they are the lead contractor. At other times they are lower down the food chain. This is a changeable and dynamic world. The whole system is based on buoyant economic conditions. Sometimes they are price setters, at other times they are scrambling for work at whatever price they can get. But the key to their success is the low cost-structure of the business. If they aren’t working they aren’t earning. But on the other hand, if business turns bad their overheads are quite manageable.
These two worlds don’t intersect at many points, except when the director chappie is having a major reno done on his house, or when the non-executive directors are asleep at the wheel while the CFO drives a company off the road, taking a large part of the aspirational’s private superannuation account with it.
Paulus
I am a born and bred Sydeny Westie who went to the most rough as guts public schools, and even I can tell a Saint’s boy, after he has uttered only one sentence.
I consider myself working class,what else can I be if Telstra Bills worry me,I hoe out prickles and work in a potato shed and help sometimes around the cattle,for a owner who once lumped wheat on his back,and till this day admits failures in education!?What else can I be if I am so angry with Labor for seeing it con people for decades now,whilst the Libs exploit..the only way forward is applying my own intelligence to matters and thus engage in production in matters other than doing..doing immediately!?What else am I if not working class to now understand my parents dilemma in bringing up six kids,and all by my Father s acceptance of a Jack Lang statement ..that Australia needed workers for the future.No matter what I may end up like at the end of my life I cannot be anything ,but working class.And to me that title endears,no matter what,including the fact,I am well and truly pensioned off.I say this, go to operas, read widely and do not underestimate those who consider themselves working class to be disappointed at Warne as some sort of cultural indicator.The working class in our history havent majored in power,academia, every business ,military public service.We do not conform,if we exist..we lead and you will listen and comprehend.
The suggestion there is not a great distinction between High and Low culture is such nonsense, that could be claimed only by philistines or disingenuous stirrers.
What’s the distinction then? Just interested.
“What’s the distinction then?”
Could it be economic? They are both worthy areas for study and analysis but
high culture has a lot of barrackers whinging to the government for financial support – it is in the interests of society the supporters say , the masses must have access to the output of subsidised artists – filmmakers, writers, dancers, actors and their directors and associated hangers on and especially opera companies.The work may be difficult to access both physically and intellectually but that’s not the point .
Low culture is left to grow under it’s own financial efforts -it’s output is for sale , it is addictive or it is popular. Drag races, rugby and other sport codes, amusement arcade games and gaming generally,comix and graffiti artists could be examples.No governement support needed for these to flourish.
Mark
Having the temerity to bash out an off-the-top-of-my-head answer to this trip-wired and fraught question, particularly within the provocative milieu you have posed it, is to invite screeds of derision. But I ask y’all to be generous and to show some of the contextual thinking y’all so often decry as lacking in others. To use a legal analogy, consider this post an ‘invitation to treat’ rather than an ‘offer.’
After all, Susan Sontag said she spent six months writing just one essay (her best) – Notes on Camp.
The distinction between High Culture and Low Culture is simply the distinction between the transcendent and universalising nature of the former versus the local and ephemeral nature of the latter. High Culture (HC) is ultimately rooted in religion. The Luvvies’ greater comfort with “spiritualityâ€? will not do. Thus HC requires instruction for both the creator and the consumer; instruction which goes beyond the immediate sense-data gleaned from day-to-day life. OTOH, popular culture involves a more-or-less visceral or spontaneous response to that immediate and local sensory data, and indeed is – dialectically – part of that very sense data itself. This is why CultiStudies types are overwhelmingly atheist Leftists.
Let me begin by emphasising my own birth in, being raised in, and still madly in love with popular culture. I grew up in a house whose ‘library’ contained only books written by a Mr. Harold Robbins; which only watched the ABC when Countdown was on; which had the Daily Mirror and Sun delivered each afternoon by the paperboy (a highly prestigious occupation, occupied briefly by my younger brother!), and Rugby League Week delivered weekly. Rummaging through my father’s wardrobe revealed all sorts of titillating post-literary delights such as Playboy, but even better, Ribald and Bawdy; rummaging my father revealed several years later, to a room filled with my new-found HC-literate set, he had been aware of since I was 14! One of my more painful memories was as an 18 year old buying a Sydney Morning Herald for the first time, and spending an entire train journey to my grandparents place outside Gosford bamboozled over how to turn the pages, let around read the damn thing. Of course, nowadays, I would rescue a similar 18 year old from ever feeling obliged to buy SMH ever again.
During my adolescence, weekend days were spent traipsing to wherever Parramatta games were held. Nights were spent trawling either the Comb and Cutter at Blacktown, Penrith Leagues, the St. Mary’s 2WS disco (where my girlfriend and I won an onstage pashing competition), Selinas at Coogee, the Royal Antler at Narrabeen, the Governor’s Pleasure at the Rocks watching INXS, Midnight Oil, Radiators, Divinyls, Jimmy and the Boys, Sunnyboys, Go-Betweens, Spy vs. Spy, Hunners, Do-Re-Me, the Flaming Hands, Angels, Mental as Anything, Cold Chisel, Men at Work. We would drive in one of my mates’ panel-vans and when we went to the Penrith Drive-In, my girlfriend – let’s call her “Elizabethâ€? – had to hide under the mattress, as she ‘didn’t look 18.’ As if WE did! ï?Š We would chuck donuts in Craig’s (let’s call him Craig) lime-green Torana. We were to be blunt; the Westies from hell.
Recently over at Club Troppo a few of us exchange our delight at seeing the Pinchgut Opera’s performance of Juditha Triumphans. Rather than recounting it here, y’all can just pop over yourselves.
http://clubtroppo.com.au/2007/12/14/after-the-decapitation/#comments
To presume to tie Culture down with such a flaccid device as narrative prose is bound to provide easy escape for both the concept and its divisions; but we must try. To insist on a distinction between High and Low Culture (HC/LC) of course begs the question, What is Culture? Which of course introduces its cognates: civilisation, manners, customs, rituals, and others. With a tip of the hat to Saussure and a thumbed-nose to Derrida, the most useful distinction among these cognates would be between culture and civilisation. The latter requires technology, legal and administrative structures within a settled urban context for each of production, distribution, exchange, and play.
Culture thus includes music, literature, performance, language, art, and history: performance here is generously defined to include theatre, manners, sport, and so on; similarly literature covers comics, gossip rags, novels, poetry, newspapers; similar inclusiveness for the genres of other forms of culture. For the obsessively vain among you who are wont to sprout the banalities of – “the race ladyâ€? – Gayatri Spivak, Dipesh Chakrabarty and the ludicrous racists Michel de Certeau and Paul Carter, let us also admit orally-transmitted myths, the ululations of piccaninnies and such. Each of music, literature, performance, language, art, and history attends both HC and LC: the very notion of culture is its acting like a communal gas – or perhaps better, perfume – infusing all, and all the time. However, not each genre within these forms, let alone particular examples of said genre, can be indiscriminately defined as HC and/or LC.
It is for this reason the Australian Aborigines did not have a civilisation when humanity’s most advanced civilisation – Great Britain – came calling in the late eighteenth century: ‘Culture’ in the much less material, much less physical, much less pindownable sense. Of course ’Culture’ certainly can, and overwhelming does, rely on the accoutrements of civilisation, but is not defined by them. After the British arrived, many Aboriginal tribes abandoned their traditional lifestyles in favour of the stable supply of whiteman’s flour, sugar, booze, and jobs on pastoral runs, their culture, ipso facto, largely died. Those who maintained a defiant separation continued to live within their ancient cultural mores, which were thus sustained.
The more perspicacious LP-er will, of course, spot the spatial element in this delineation of LC, and quiet rightly object. S/he will point to the increasing annihilation of space in our present age of digital cultural transmission, that is the very definition of the so-called ‘age of postmodernism.’ And s/he is correct. One ‘spatial’ aspect that still does have much resonance, however, is language. However, I maintain that this serves only to strengthen the distinction between HC and LC, as this new age of global transmission of LC and the attendant ideological factions who focus on this in the education institutions serves only to narrow more and more the numbers able to participate in the beauty and rewards of HC.
Much of my passionate objection to the postit Ghastlies is that they are constructing the Road to Barbarism; encouraging a return to medievalism, whereby the vast majority of cultural serfs will be locked out of HC – which will be transmitted by only the most elite private schools and universities – just like the Dark and Middle Ages. But of course said Ghastlies, have been, are, and will continue to be, the products of those very same elite institutions. On Roland Barthes’ Mythologies – in the mid 1980s – one wag sniffed that this recently discovered delight by the bourgeois in the cultural diets of hoi polloi as ‘there are the lower pleasures for the rabble, i.e. popular culture, and then there is the nouvelle cuisine of the intellectual‘s deconstruction of that popular culture.’ The deconstructing denizens of The Luvviesphere are of course said nouvelle cuisine nibblers.
In fact, the great hypocrisy, con, and tragedy of the academic CultiStudies bloviators is they starve unless they are sucking on the teat of the very HC they deny exists on a separate plane to LC. OTOH, the really great pop culture commentators have had none of the stitched-up po-faced Continental modernist philosophy shoved up their ass. Give me Julie Burchill, Ruth Ritchie, George Orwell, Doug Anderson, Christopher Hitchens, Susie Bright or any day over the culturally-starved CultiStudi Luvvies who produced abominations such as Taking Up the Challenge: Critical Race and Whiteness Studies in a Postcolonising Nation! or this doozey, Country Matters: Sexing the Reconciled Republic of Australia
Can anybody think of anything more bourgeois, debased, and preposterous than a University of Sydney honours graduate being funded to write a PhD thesis on revhead car magazines stuffed to the gills with effusions from old men and women ’philosophers’ from France who have never been to Australia, let alone experienced the sheer ecstasy of chucking donuts in a canary-yellow SLR 5000 Torana with fluffy-dice wrapped around the rear-view mirror, or screaming from a panel van – whose bumper-sticker reads ’don’t laugh lady, your daughter might be inside’ – as it crosses the bridge over Narrabeen Lagoon “fuck ‘er mate, I did“ as revenge for a similar van screeching “fucking westies,“ “poofters,â€? “molls,â€? and so on as we walked across the same bridge in flannelette shirts only the previous week? Even though they were not far wrong, there was still the principle, you see. Try growing up in a part of Sydney when a mate’s elder brother was kicked out of home for buying a Falcon and having the gall to presume he was allowed to park inside the boundaries of this Holden-partisan family‘s Housing Commission home!
Or the tragic sight of the genteel middle-aged bourgeois lady – hair bobbed and coiffed in the tradition of baby-boomer private school boarding school lasses – thinking her attendance at a tackily vanilla inner Sydney “sex clubâ€? with her husband was a pressing experience requiring academic deconstruction? Or her appointment as a Professor at her sandstone alma mater on the basis of her gushing over Monica Lewinsky and Sara Marie from Big Brother!? Actually, I retract that. The very essence of The Luvviesphere implies that over one hundred examples at least – and probably more – of such excesses of snotty banality could be dumped within five seconds of this post appearing. If not from the Luvvies themselves, then from their avatars’ onanisms within the pages of Social Text.
Contrary to the notion that HC is objectionable because it relies on an economic system that allows only the rich to access it, both HC and LC demand initiations and rites of passage. In the realm of HC, tis true, explicit institutional settings have served as cathedrals to baptise one into HC; Homer and the Greek myths, Confucius, elementary Attic Greek (and Latin) syntax, vocab, and grammar, The Bible, The Koran, classic Greek tragedy, comedy, and satire, Roman oratory, Plato, blah Tragically, Sydney Grammar is the only school in Australia (of which I am aware), that includes Sanskrit in its Classics curriculum. But then again, how many Australian schools actually have a Classics department anymore?
One short classic that sets one up quite well is, of course, Aristotle’s Poetics. I only discovered this gem while torturing myself with Hayden White’s history-as-narrative shtick. And do not even leave the house without the piece de resistance of modernist exposition of HC, Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy. In fact, despite the deification of Nietzsche that goes in CultiStudies, I rarely get even a whiff they have digested the profound significance of The Birth of Tragedy for debates about HC vs. LC. Then of course, Milton’s Paradise Lost and T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. I find WH Auden particularly apposite to the CultiStudi smugsters celebrating their murder of HC.
The stars are not wanted now:
put out every one;
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood;
For nothing now can ever come to any good.
Of course having some elementary exposure to physics, chemistry, biology, geology perception, cognition, memory, and neurophysiology help enormously, as of course does basic set/group theory. Curiously the HC-slayers eschew these. I suspect due to less than impressive Iqs.
To this extent, I do subscribe somewhat to the ideas of Matthew Arnold that Mark touched on. Oscar Wilde comes alive even more once you have read/studied Greek New Comedy such as Menander and his Latin heirs, such as Plautus and Terence; Wilde himself, of course, was an Oxford Classics graduate. And who can possibly endure Brian Clarke, John Dawe, or Max Gilles after consuming Juvenal and Aristophanes (though Roy and HG still rock, Aristophanes or no!); and do not even mention The Glass House and that insufferable bogan, Dave Hughes. Nor even attempt to dismiss me as a “snob!â€? I adore quality bogan behaviour and flourishes – such as Shane Warne – but not the Kool Aid served by Hughes and his sooky sidekicks. And if Phillip Adams is reading, and still hasn’t recovered from Howard’s winning 2001 campaign launch “We will decide who comes into this countryâ€? do yourself a favour and catch Thucydides’ account of Cleon’s appeal to the Athenian polis to invade their ally Melos, kill all the men, and enslave all the women and children. Now, THEY were the days of real democracy!
But the apex of HC is music. Curiously one thing that requires no mastery of language or literature to experience, but quite a mastery to appreciate. But can LC really match the transcendence of Bach’s St Matthew Passion? Ever the most atheistic could not resist the frisson of a competent choir’s kidnapping us and entombing us within mythology, even if only for a moment longer than Clueless?
Of course, I only need one word to prove the reality of the distinction between HC and LC and its increasing gap between the former to hoi polloi; DRUGS. The modern secular youth has no culture without drugs; nor does the haute bourgeois Gen-X and baby-boomers. Do not walk the streets of South Yarra or Paddington if you have a death-inducing allergy to Columbian Marching Powder. Oh, but how the Luvvies savage the kids of Hillsong! The ennui of The Brave New Secular World, while announced by Andy Warhol’s “fifteen minutes of fame� and his films such as Trash, whose redemptive finale involves the “heroine� being re-assured by her lover that from now on “no more Coke bottles.�
OTOH, pop music, particularly Rock is about one thing: SEX! Yet how many twenty-first century pop artists can do sex like the Dionysian foreplay of Keith Richard’s guitar riffs on Sympathy for the Devil, let alone Satisfaction! Billy Idol, Marvin Gaye. And name one pre-menopausal doesn’t get an itch in the nether regions at the first bars of Cold Chisel, ACDC, or person Compare the abominations of Jessica Simpson, Britney Spears, etc. to Melanie’s Lay Down, Kelly Marie’s Make Love to Me And let’s not even start on Grace Jones, Sylvester.
Oh and to all the bourgeois baby-boomer Presbyterian Melbourne blue-stocking feminazis a la the unlamentably returned home Virginia Trioli (talk about good riddance to bourgeois bad-rubbish), Chrissie Amphlett’s Boys in Town ain‘t no misogynist myth created by Helen Garner.
Post disco, pub rock, house, the sad and sickly nihilism of Nirvana revealed for us all the soul of the world’s first secular generation. While Kurt Kobain’s demise unleashed the heartbreak that attends all suicides – including inflicting Courtney Love onto the rest of us as a “celebrityâ€? in ’her own right’ – his anguish was anticipated by The Verve summing up the angst and emptiness, beautifully: The drugs don’t work anymore. Mind you, I like The Verve, but their despair was emblematic of – with props to the Divine Shirley Strachan- Loving High Culture in a Low, Low World!
Brett Easton Ellis’ oeuvre culminating in American Psycho, whose anomie is sucked on by the tenured spiritual vampires teaching CultiStudies and Critical Literacy, thus exposing us to the sheer fraud of a sandstone university Professor hitting the airwaves to opine on the tawdry ‘Turkey-slapping� incident on Big Brother! What forces conspire to guarantee such dopey bints being awarded life-long tenure and a six-figure salaries at Australia’s top universities?
But do not get me wrong: Drugs do mimic a type of transcendence capable of transporting one to the Dionysian ecstasy of Euripides’ Bacchanates. Not for nothing was one of the formative experiences of my life, the early 1990s Horden Pavilion Dance Party Bacchanalia, when Joe Smooth’s Promised Land played not only unforgettable House riffs, but played midwife to the first time I ever had more than one ecstasy tablet in a single sesh! Oh, and then there was the biblical stuff.
Mind you, when pop culture nods more positively to some vaguely spiritual – if not explicitly religious – space, the effect is dynamite as in the The Triffids Wide Open Road. And what of arguably the saddest pop song ever, Harry Chapin’s Cats and the Cradle? whose end sees the former jet-setting thus absent father, and realising in his loneliness and estrangement from his son, phoning his son
I’ve long since retired, my son’s moved away
I called him up just the other day
I said, “I’d like to see you if you don’t mind”
He said, “I’d love to, Dad, if I can find the time
You see my new job’s a hassle and kids have the flu
But it’s sure nice talking to you, Dad
It’s been sure nice talking to you”
And as I hung up the phone it occurred to me
He’d grown up just like me
My boy was just like me
cannot fail to chill any person who has been told “you’re a long-time dead� or “life is no dress rehearsal.� Familiarity with Robert Frost’s poem The Road Not Taken can only guarantee shudders and tears:
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I -
I took the one less travelled by,
And that has made all the difference.
While Cats in The Cradle, Promised Land and Wide Open Road nod to transcendence and universalism in theme, they do not in solution, musical composition, or intellectual demand.
Similarly The Smiths’ How Soon Is Now? comes bloody close to transcendent despite its conscious setting of loneliness within the very specific culture of 1980s northern English nightclubs during the darkest years of Thatcherism. OTOH, The Beatles’ Elanor Rigby, relies on less a temporal setting. I defy anybody not to be blissfully relieved of all their cares and anxieties – even if only for 2:45 minutes – within five seconds of The Archies 1969 smash Sugar Sugar (which as you aficionados of Kasey Kasim’s weekly US Billboard Top 40 on 2SM will recall was the Number 2 best-selling song of the 1960s, behind The Beatlesâ€? Hey Jude, which also remains the song which spent most weeks at Number 1 on Australian chart history at 16 weeks, with Abba’s Fernando, just behind with 15 weeks. But I digress).
Of course, since the 1970s, pop culture itself increasingly makes demands on intertextuality. For example, Oasis’ What’s The Story Morning Glory is wasted on anybody not au fait with The Beatles. OTOH, what serious film-buff cannot shiver with horror along with Julie Burchill at the diabolical rumours that 1930s classic The Women is to be remade with such anodyne fembots as Meg Ryan and Lisa Kudrow? L’Amour, L‘Amour? More like, Quelle horreur!! Fortunately, Joan Crawford has gone to that great Bitchslapping Powder room in the sky with Bette Davis, Norm Shearer, Roslyn Russel, Talulah Bankhead, Mae West, and will be spared. And anybody who grew up with their parents’ Chuck Berry, Muddy Waters, Charlie Pride, Johnny Cash, Neil Diamond’s Holly Holy (Hot August Night version) and Motown records can only feel like the subject of a Smith’s song every time a Destiny’s Child song went to Number 1. And what student of Derrida would not collapse as Neil Diamond’s I Am, I Said, begs the question of the silenced ’Other’ “middle voice?� My mother’s own predilection for Deep Purple and Rod Stewart were also excellent preparation for the execrable Destiny’s Child. Oh, and don’t start me on the dude in the tea-cozey as Ruth Ritchie began her derision of the John Butler Trio! Compare the almost transcendent Aretha Franklin’s Say A Little Prayer.
Hasn’t film proved to be a great disappointment? I must say, I suffered the Valhalla in Glebe in silence, too intimidated to share my boredom (or perhaps mere incomprehension) with the HC-set from SCEGGS, Grammar, and Ascham. Barely disguising my relief at the end of Paris Texas..Film simply is not, and never will be, a HC genre; not even John Waters ones The very collaborative nature of filmmaking exposes any film to a great many weak links. True, pop-culture films occasionally soar to middlebrow, but can never be a form of HC. Though I adore the New Zilland version of The Sopranos Outrageous Fortune, especially Cheryl West. And what sort of society allows Kath and Kim to be broadcast rather than nightly radio serialisations of Pride and Prejudice cooing over the ether?
Films like Praiser anything involving sullen serfs-in-training shooting up, or with eczema, hold no attraction. Why would such otiose characters, when one has lived the real thing? Of course for bourgeois Luvvies expensing their ARC grants, such perving on the otiose and dermatologically-challenged counts as “research.â€? OTOH, I loved Trainspotting, but perhaps more as a lesson and kick-in-the-arse than as a transcendent Tardis. Certainly not nouvelle cuisine, that’s for sure. There is no transcendence, only ever “hope.â€? Though I do love the explicitly religious epics – Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, the Shawshank Redemption…….
Alas, I am all types out for now.
I thought I would add some thoughts to this thread, and perhaps attempt to return to Mark’s original post.
I fundamentally agree with Mark’s over-arching point that the concept of the “culture wars” is deeply incoherent. I’ve always seen the “elites” as a very convenient bait-and-switch strategy for lazy right-wing commentators, who were able to pretend in print for many years that they were really on the side of the “battlers” against the “elites” – in other words, neatly inverting the true relationship.
But in the actual realm of culture, the culture wars have been keenly felt. Artists of all types have been regularly villified as being out of touch, wierd and elite by politicians, journalists and authors like Katherine Betts. This is a sad and quite counter-factual – artists are in fact amongst the poorest and most marginalised of Australia’s working classes (when they work at all).
We saw the same confusion used to justify the interests of Australia’s real cultural elite – the major arts organisations and festivals that enjoy significant public funding and private sponsorship and philanthropy. While Howard never actually had an explicit “cultural policy” his vaarious arts ministers made a series of decisions to fund exactly the sort of high arts and canonistic culture tropes that in other contexts were so villified.
Howard’s government saw huge increases in funding to opera, orchestras and the large “major performing arts” organisations. In contrast, the Australia Council’s community arts and new media boards were abolished, our media and internet laws were continually manipulated to serve the interests of powerful players like the Packers and Telstra, and much of our cultural sovereignty was negotiated away in the US FTA.
Is there a cultural elite? If there is, it’s not artists, academics and ABC journalists. The wealthy business elite who like to rub shoulders with the occassional high-profile festival director or celebrity actor and who attend Richard Pratt’s regular dinner parties at his Melbourne mansion would seem a much better fit to this description.
As far as I’m aware, the “lazy right-wing commentators” don’t wander around wearing a T-shirt saying “I’m a culture warrior — and proud of it!”
Instead, it seems to me that the term “culture war” is used to condemn and silence anyone who criticises any element of the arts community from a non-left-wing perspective.
Ben talks about the “regular vilification” of artists. But haven’t artists, whatever their medium, always been subject to robust and often nasty criticism? Artists put their work squarely in the public gaze; if they can’t stand some negative commentary from time to time, perhaps they should consider a different occupation.
And as for Howard directing funding to opera, orchestras, etc — isn’t he just following in the footsteps of our great Labor PMs? Weren’t Keating and Whitlam famous for their love and patronage of the “high arts”? Did they ever do much for local community arts? I can’t see those guys rocking up regularly to the Bankstown Socialist Workers’ Theatre Collective.
Do community arts need much $ anyway? You can run a local theatre group on the smell of an oily rag, but you won’t be able to sustain a symphony orchestra or an opera company without some serious dough.
Huh? How can they be silenced? Their effusions are regularly published in Rupe’s flagship national newspaper.
I thought that ‘culture’ was something you grew germs in!
the bit i eventually used from Bourdieu in my diss involves his critique of kant (i think an appendix in distinction). working from memory (i am in perth away from my books) the key point is allegedly that consumers of popular culture have a ‘vulgar’ and immediate relation to cultural objects or events while the upper classes had a different defered temporal and affective relation to the cultural objects and events. there is nothing ‘essential’ to the objects/events or to the consumers. that is, the distinction is double: a hierarchy across two modes of relation or engagement (or a continuum of engagement), and then within the singular cultural fields within which particular modes of engagement or relation are predominant. bourdieu’s argument was critical of the faculty of ‘recognition’ that underpinned the judgement of these distinctions, while retaining the function of the notion of ‘recognition’. For (pre-critiques, at least) kant it was not necessarily an essential capacity of ‘recognition’. bourdieu investigated the social basis of this ‘faculty’. in my diss i explore 1) the affective dimensions (ie enthusiasm), and to a much lesser extent 2) the complicating effect of ‘producers’ in the culture ‘consumption’ equation. i was much more interested in the increasing mobility of the cultural industries (througout the 1980-1990s) to capture and capitalise on new enthusiasms.
bourdieu wrote a few stand alone essays on the genesis of classes that i think (again if memory serves) were published in slightly modified form in Outline of a Theory of Practice. I am not sure if his notion of ‘classes’ is relevant for this discussion when it is separated from his arguments regarding how they are constructed. His point here was not to look for some essentialist identity of classes, such as bourgieos, proletariat, etc. or ‘high’ and ‘low’ classes such as reported in the newspaper article, but to look at how population groups became stratified according to cultural fields.
the study seems arse-backwards by focusing on objects/events that populated previously stratified cultural fields and apparently not asking how new forms of stratification have emerged in late-capitalist/post-industrial/whatever societies.
the newspaper article is bloody typical of the stupidity of the mass-media in the way it reduces an academic study to a typology of cultural consumption of the sort that circulate as facebook funwall post memes.
Which are you?
Univores
If you will go to the cinema, but not the theatre, you are a consumer of popular culture only. Two thirds of the population are in this category.
Omnivores
Will try anything on offer. Most have jobs that give them confidence, but could be from any social background.
Paucivores
People who consume a ‘limited’ range of cultural activities. Enjoy some form of music, film or television but not art galleries.
Inactives
These people access nothing at all – people who would never go into an art gallery or stop to examine a sculpture.
Paulus,
You can run a community theatre on the smell of an oily rag, if you don’t pay your actors and back stage staff, or don’t pay playwrights royalties. But actors, backstage crew, set/costume designers, poster artists, playwrights all suffer from a very peculiar disease – they have to eat to live, and they generally try and make their living from their art.
I rest my case
http://larvatusprodeo.net/2008/01/04/cultural-elites-dont-exist-study-finds/#comment-424836
John, I’m unclear as to what you mean by your claim that “high culture” is religious.
And I’m unclear as to what Glen’s westiness has to do with anything, John—unless you’re using your own idealised Western Sydney social class as evidence of privileged experience within categories, in the Joan Scott sense of the term, to buttress your argument. In which case I call your definition of high and low cultures rubbish.
You’re trying to get across an idea of civilisation that trickles down from the opera house to the streets, a concept that’s chocked full of contempt for ordinary people’s appreciations of the culture they live in. You ought to read a bit of Anthony Smith or Ben Anderson on nationalism and national identity making its appeal via the shock of recognition, broadcasted via mediums of universal literacy, or read up on the histories of opera and popular theatre, both written quite deliberately for a popular audience. Performances of effective culture (like AC/DC’s music) appeal to experiences that already exist as universally identifiable artefacts (like shaking all night long). If they didn’t, they wouldn’t be so great. As you always say: I hope this helps.
Pace Joan Scott: I express this argument as a white, male, mostly responsible motorcyclist. I’ll see your SLR5000 in Narrabeen and raise you a dropped clutch on a Yamaha on Norton Street.
If you strip away Greenfly’s self-aggrandising working-class hero crap, frenetic culture name-checking and his desperate urge to show off his reading, you’re left with only a couple of coherent ideas nestling like carrot chunks in his pooey little polemic.
Firstly that “high culture” sets out be transcendental. Tell that to some Elizabethan theatrical entrepreneur trying to whip ‘em through the doors with a gaudy but well-written production about bloody Scottish border chieftians or satirical faerie stories with a bit of low sex comedy chucked in.
And secondly that “low culture” is now just the drug-gated province of the “hoi-polloi”. Where do the suburban crowds flocking to sell out seasons of “Phantonm of The Opera” fit in there?
And of course there’s this sublimely stupid remark
“Hasn’t film proved to be a great disappointment?”
“You’re trying to get across an idea of civilisation that trickles down from the opera house to the streets, a concept that’s chocked full of contempt for ordinary people’s appreciations of the culture they live in.”
Yer right Liam, there’s a barely-concealed streak of contempt for anyone who doesn’t think just like him running through all his observations about anything.
The weird thing is why he expends so much effort on trying to impress the same audience he so often abuses. I think there’s a play in it. Or at least an amateur musical…on thin ice.
No no no Nabakov. If I could describe cut ‘n’ pastes’s genre in two words:
“Hip Hopera”.
You mean “cut and pasties” don’t you – blog burlesque where both his eyes and ideas rotate in different directions simultaneously?
If it’s like someone’s legs and arms on a square of breakdance cardboard, yeah.
The ‘cultural rightists’ do have one basic point going for them (even though I object to their snobbery): the amount of high culture on school and academic literature curricula has drastically declined. This is a shame because it narrows our range of experience. Most young people are already quite well-versed in popular culture. High culture is good because it is often boring (valuable self-discipline), because it forces us to THINK, and because it often forces us into a drastically different historical period.
I think part of the problem is the whole consumerisation of education – where unis actively have to appeal to students. Well, students like things to BE EASY. And it’s easier to watch Big Brother than read James Joyce. Sure, you can get all culturally critical with BB, but then you can with Joyce as well. The difference is that Joyce (and most high culture) takes a lot more effort to even ‘get’ on a basic level.
I’m not so sure about this argument, David. What it appears to me to omit is the cultivation of taste in the sense of actually being excited by texts and wanting to read them. If Shakespeare were taught the horrendously tedious way it was when I was in high school (periods every week devoted to reading the plays aloud), it does anything but inspire. Jane Austen, for instance, probably has enjoyed such a big revival in part because of televisual interpretations – and I’d have thought costume drama often prompts people to read 19th century classics rather than dryasdust expositions of them in a high school classroom.
I’m by no means opposed to education being challenging, though the real challenge at the moment is to teach anything at all with class sizes too high and students taking an entirely instrumental approach to everything they’re meant to learn.
FWIW, the “cultural politics of Madonna” thing in Unis is very much on the decline as I understand it.
Mark I completing agree with you about the structural causes of the problem.
But there is one potential motivating factor for a student accepting complexity – it’s that they’ll get crappy grades if they don’t.
I don’t agree at all with the snobbish attitude to popular culture, but I do think there should be a mix, so that students get to see outside the present, and so they do weightlifting with their minds. At the moment, it is possible to do upper-level English at school or even a lit major at uni and almost completely bypass the dense stuff.
Is that so, David? It’s not the case in Queensland as I understand the Senior English syllabus and I wonder if this whole “high school is just about reading sms” theme isn’t a bit of a myth drummed up for political purposes by the late Government and its epigones.
It is so at Adelaide Uni, Mark. Here are the 2nd/3rd year course offerings:
A Festival of Contemporary Writing
Dangerous Liaisons: Writing Out of Africa
English for Professional Purposes
Women’s Writing: The Nineteenth Century
Self Writing
Reading and Writing Poetry
Hollywood or Bust!
Australian Classics: Literature & Film
Representing Truth and Reconciliation
The Art of Crime: Fictions of Transgression
The Women’s Writing subject may contain HC, if you classify Jane Austen as HC. (What’s your view on that, JG?)
Perhaps there’s a bit of HC in some of the other subjects, such as Reading and Writing Poetry.
But overall the syllabus is dominated by genre fiction, Oz Lit, film studies, creative writing, and utilitarian courses (English for Professional Purposes being no doubt a cunning way to get bright law students to visit the English department!).
I’m not really attacking any of these subjects. The Crime fiction one looks rather delicious. But the range of subjects shows the truth of David’s point that: “it is possible to do upper-level English at school or even a lit major at uni and almost completely bypass the dense stuff.”
Crime fiction or women’s writing can’t be dense? Or poetry or autobiography? I don’t think you can make such judgements from the titles of courses, to be honest, Paulus. So much depends on the teacher.
In any case, it’s fruitless to want universities to prescribe a curriculum of one’s own desiring. In my own discipline, there are many things I think need to be taught that aren’t because they’re difficult or not popular. But the quasi-market funding model where disciplines are de-emphasised and bums on lecture theatre seats drive funding makes any such view fruitless because it’s completely out of kilter with an academic regime driven by the god of choice.
Of the courses you’ve listed Paulus, and with the little information available online, I could say with some confidence that a majority of those courses are NOT dominated by any of the following: “genre fiction [...] film studies, creative writing, and utilitarian[ism]“, and some may contain none of those things listed at all. I also have to remove Oz Lit from this list because there is plenty of Australian literary fiction around that is very much HC, is complex, difficult and as challenging as anything in the European canon.
Klaus K,
Definitely have to agree about Oz.lit being high culture. And I’m not sure what dense is – Hemingway, not. Pynchon, yes? Lawson not, White, yes? I could give a long list of axamnples, as I’m sure we all could.
I was wondering about that choice of term in retrospect. Camus, for instance, could hardly be called “dense” (either in terms of style of writing or length of text) but that doesn’t necessarily make him less worthy of study than James Joyce.
“Can anybody think of anything more bourgeois, debased, and preposterous than a University of Sydney honours graduate being funded to write a PhD thesis on revhead car magazines stuffed to the gills with effusions from old men and women ’philosophers’ from France who have never been to Australia, let alone experienced the sheer ecstasy of chucking donuts in a canary-yellow SLR 5000 Torana with fluffy-dice wrapped around the rear-view mirror, …”
Is this meant to be a dig at me? lol
I am from Perth (Curtin Uni graduate, thanks). I got a PhD gig because my honours thesis was on hoons, I was working as a motoring journo, and my supervisors needed a hoon for their linkage grant ARC project with the NRMA. BTW, my diss is more about enthusiasm in modified-car culture, than the actual cars or whatever. It belongs to a critical literature, not an enthusiast literature.
The point I was making in the previous comment was that if high and low culture are not different sets of objects/events, but different bodily comportments or relations to objects/events then at least two points become obvious:
1) University education is no less a ‘high’ culture nowadays because the critical disposition is still cultivated in students; now it is just used to analyse so-called ‘low’ culture.
2) Cultural conservatives are pissed off because they want to control the bourgeois cultural institutions that restrict access to so-called ‘high’ cultural objects/events, if ‘high’ culture does not reside in the objects/events then their institutions are shown to be out-of-date monuments of class stratification and nothing more. This is what the real fight is about: “‘Classics’ must still be important!!”
Funny, I thought only good books became classics.So we should not read well-written books that are deeply insightful to the human condition. What f***king piffle!
And I’m also a very keen devotee of popular culture, thank you.
Now that I’ve seen the cards that John Greenfield is holding, I’m actually disappointed. Here I was thinking that there was some substance in there somewhere, but in a truly vacuous display, what is revealed is how much energy has gone into what amounts to a lot of pseudo-intellectual posturing. Well done, Mr Greenfield, you’ve destroyed your own well-cultivated mystique.
glen
My example explicitly did not name names, as that would not have been fitting with the posts ‘voice;’ nor particularly gentlemanly/scholarly.
While some of the examples used in my post were certainly inspired by real life situations of which I am aware, my intention was never to diss any particular individual.
I was careful to write Can anybody think of anything more bourgeois, debased, and preposterous than a University of Sydney honours graduate…. Clearly if the closest one can think of is a Dawkins Uni honours graduate, one must answer in the nagative to this question.
To the extent that any reader is offended by references to ’sandstone universities,’ as a slur on either their good self, or perhaps colleagues, great aunts, etc. then please do accept my most sincere apologies.
I don’t get it. The “Dawkins Uni” is worthy of contempt, but the “sandstone uni” is to be applauded? On what grounds? Class-i-ness? Because in the JG Universe, I thought Sydney, Queensland, etc, were also hotbeds of that awful po/mo and full of ghastly luvvies.
glen
Also, said honours graduate was more the indirect object of my point; the true focus being the Torana-ignorant old French blokes and Mad-dames.
In fact, a close reading shows my lament for the poor honours graduate, who is the true victim.
What piffle.
BTW, I think glen is spot on with the idea that high culture and low culture represent “different bodily comportments or relations to objects/events” rather than objects or events in themselves with some incommensurable differences stemming from intention or content, or a relationship to ‘transcendence’ in definite religious or irreligious senses.
What I would add to this is that we approach cultural texts from specific contexts that are shaped by histories of interpretation etc that do have something valuable to impart about how much is likely to be gained from certain texts – this is where we could speak of the value of classics, in their interpretive and intertextual ramifications that then provide a set of sign-posts and ready-made sites for shifting comportment. Value is constructed through these histories of interpretation and through the record of comportment and relation to objects/events: it is constructed but it is also real, and it means that attention to certain texts may provide a kind of short-cut to critical comportments and relations. What could be called ‘low culture’ demands a different kind of intellectual rigour, then, because of the lack of this scaffolding. On the other hand, the weight of interpretive scaffolding has it’s own risks, including the elevation of texts in place of developing those kinds of relations.
Klaus
Well given that took me quite a while (I am a Luddite, and Miss Hathaway has nipped out to the sales), as I said I was not aiming to be Susan Sontag. But I am surprised by your summary dismissal. I expected more from you. Please lift YOUR game and Please Explain.
Good summary, Kim.
Obviously if the author of said piffle submitted something similar in essay form, and received anything other than an F, it would be indicative of declining standards at whichever tertiary instiution is fortunate enough to host the piffler.
Why anyone feels the need to endlessly pontificate on an imaginary distinction between to two fallacious concepts such as high and low culture is beyond me.
Most people would be too busy actually enjoying many aspects of the culture around them to bother with intellectually barren prejudices masquerading as analysis.
Having just read the Independent article, you’re right, it is piffle! What abominable scholarship. Mark, how could you so uncritically post an affirmation of such pap?
I think that glen, however does make some valid points, although the more you look into the claimed distinctions between ‘high and low’ culture the more you realise the meaningless of these distinctions and the whole notion of high and low in relation to culture.
adrian/glen/Klaus
As I said, on Roland Barthes’ Mythologies – in the mid 1980s – one wag sniffed that this recently discovered delight by the bourgeois in the cultural diets of hoi polloi as ‘there are the lower pleasures for the rabble, i.e. popular culture, and then there is the nouvelle cuisine of the intellectual‘s deconstruction of that popular culture.’ The deconstructing denizens of The Luvviesphere are of course said nouvelle cuisine nibblers.
How prescient of said wag to warn of the imminence of y’all. ‘)
A strong force behind the distinction between high and low culture comes out of English poet, schools inspector and cultural critic Matthew Arnold’s project: to protect civilisation from anarchy and barbarism. The skills of poetry reading that I was taught at HSC level in the early 1980s still had the cultural residue of Arnold’s project: the sense from my teachers that with a bit of effort and sensitivty Coleridge’s poetry would whisper something civilised in your ear. And if you had the sensibility to hear it, you too were civilised, sophisticated and so on.
As historians of the discipline of English, like Chris Baldick, argue, the problem with the Arnoldian project, and its refinement by the Leavises in the early c20, was that ‘getting’ (or maybe in glen’s terms ‘recognising’) literary value was more often than not something ‘revealed’ by someone already inducted into the Arnoldian project.
The culture-war heat over the last few years about English curricula, at seconday and tertiary levels, seems to turn on a sense of lost literary value, and as a consequence, lost contact with the best that has been thought and said (Arnold’s project). On the one hand the stakes are about gatekeeping positions: who gets to decide what has cultural value; which producers-authors are authorised to produce valuable culture. But the values themselves are important: in my field of OzLit a novel like Grenville’s ‘The Secret River’ can be evaluated against Alexis Wright’s ‘Carpentaria’. Both are concerned with frontier conflict and the possibilities of reconciliation. But I think Wright’s novel is more valuable, if only because she is using more of the possibilities of literary form to approach a deadlocked problem than Grenville. While ‘The Secret River’ employs a conventional third person, fairly chronological historical narrative, Carpentaria criss-crosses a variety of times and genres: much like Public Enemy’s ‘Fight the Power’ or even certain episodes of the Simpsons. It’s on the formal level that cultural value is most relevant – which would mean that high and low cultural distinctions are less important, in an educational setting, than an induction into the skills of formalism, with the proviso that a little formalism takes you away from history, whereas a lot takes you right into the think of it.
BTW JG, don’t stop writing and posting! I feel your pain – your bound to cop a fair bit of abuse because ‘you ask for it’. I thought your essay was reaching toward the form of what followers of the postit-Cultistudi crew like me would call ficto-critical: critical but acknowledging and narrativising your own experience which is presented through fictional-literary techniques.
On the other hand
Yes, very amusing, John Greenfield, but said wag was a cheap point-scorer who knew nothing of Barthes, and in repeating it you yourself are a cheap point-scorer who cannot even integrate that position into the rest of your argument which I could only categorise as deeply ambivalent with respect to your chosen signifiers of class. (BTW Barthes in Mythologies is not talking about ‘the lower pleasures of the rabble’ but about the entire contemporary cultural landscape of post-war France – advertising, criticism, popular culture, ‘bourgeois’ culture, the mythical status of wine for the French nation FFS!) According to the model put forward by glen, popularity would be a variable entirely independent of any high culture/low culture division anyway.
To put my objection to your above position simply: I take issue with your whole essentialist immanence vs transcendence account of low culture and high culture. Where is there a definite instance of transcendence in a piece of music or in any text, except perhaps in the content? If I were to follow your account of near-transcendent popular music I would have to assume it rests on a series of pathetic (ie appealing to the emotions) chord changes which are as heavy handed as they are satisfying. Actually immanence/transcendence is only one instance of your constant appeal to sets of distinctions that yield no new or particularly interesting insight into anything that you discuss.
Klaus K, some of those courses obviously pertain to the categories I listed. “The Art of Crime” presumably relates to the genre of crime fiction. “Hollywood or Bust” is a film studies course. EPP is, for want of a better word, a utilitarian course. Then you have offerings in Oz Lit and contemporary fiction.
I reiterate that I am not critising any of these. I am just pointing out that there appears to be no option for studying much of the traditional Western literary canon.
Without buying into the HC/LC argument, I would suggest that it should be possible to go to any major university and take courses, if you wish, on the literature that has featured most prominently through the history of Western civilisation.
Jonathan Sacks explains the value of this:
“Until recently, national cultures were predicated on the idea of a canon, a set of texts that everyone knew. In the case of Britain they included the Bible, Shakespeare and the great novels. The existence of a canon is essential to a culture. It means that people share a set of references and resonances, a public vocabulary of narratives and discourse. Until the early 1950s a politician could quote the Bible and expect people to know what he was alluding to. No longer.”
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/guest_contributors/article2697772.ece
Well, at least I could understand what John G wrote.
On the other hand, Klaus K’s response at #122, frankly, is completely incomprehensible to me. And I am not thick and I do read widely, including “difficult” philosophical texts – though not post-modern.
What is the point of writing in such a way? And what purpose is served in making oneself incomprehensible? I’d wager most reasonably intelligent and educated (by whatever means) people who read this sort of language constructed in this way would think, quite rightly, that the author either has nothing of substance to say, or, just as bad, is incapable of expressing themselves clearly and therefore is not worth even trying to understand.
But Paulus, no one talked much about canons etc until F. R. Leavis came along.
Leavis didn’t publish “The Great Tradition” until the late 1948s.
No one thought very much about how bits and pieces of literature fit together until then. Folks just read stuff that was supposed to be great, without ever really articulating why.
Leavis introduced Hawthorne and Melville into his “great tradition”. Until the late 1920s virtually no one read these chaps. They had disappeared into the mists that envelop minor literary figures.
So why fetishise a habit that is only as old as the Morris Minor?
And that’s a problem? Why?
Sacks’ argument seems to me to be nonsense.
It reminds me of the way that public school gentlemen used to chuck in untranslated tags from Horace to show they had a good classical education.
It’s perfectly possible to have a good quality public debate without the use of Shakespearian metaphors that “everyone” understands.
As to the Adelaide Uni stuff, you’ve ignored my previous comment, Paulus. The most likely reason why your canon isn’t on offer is that students didn’t choose to take those courses, and rules about “no course with less than 20 enrolments” saw them axed. It happens. As I said, the marketplace of choice is god in the neo-liberal university, not the conservative canon.
In any case, I strongly suspect that there’s more value in reading the classics for enjoyment rather than being forced to take courses on them which may be indifferently taught and detract from rather than enhance the texts. Griffith Uni has a compulsory course on “Great Books” for first year Arts students. I can’t remember how I got onto it, but last year I was talking about Becky Sharp. The existence of the said course made no difference to the blank stares I got compared to blank stares I’ve got when on similar tangents at other unis without such a course.
Jinmaro, what I was doing was agreeing with glen who was suggesting that a more useful distinction would be between ways of reading, rather than the intrinsic components of texts themselves. What I added was that ‘classics’ have a whole body of other texts and practices around them – interpretation, citation, ways of reading etc – that have developed over time, and that may allow readers to move into a critical or contemplative space more readily.
Is this clearer? I don’t mean to put people off, but I took it for granted that glen and John Greenfield would follow what I was arguing, and they were my main interlocutors to that point.
BTW Given the tone of your meta-commentary, I would say you are looking for a heated exchange, but you won’t have it from me today. My apologies, but I’ve expended all of my negativity on responding to John Greenfield.
“In any case, I strongly suspect that there’s more value in reading the classics for enjoyment rather than being forced to take courses on them which may be indifferently taught and detract from rather than enhance the texts.”
I agree to an extent, although I think that difficult texts can be really useful if you have the time and energy to teach them well. For most young readers I encounter, pre-C20th works are quite difficult, and my response is to work through them slowly. It’s the pace that’s forced on you, and even the sense that you’re reading something that’s supposed to be ‘more meaningful’ that can yield closer attention to the text.
On Katz’ point, which is perfectly correct, I suspect the establishment by Penguin of its Classics series in 1946, had an influence on the definition of a “classic” and the canon which I think would repay some investigation.
Also, Mark is quite correct about the removal of low-enrolment courses. It is the neo-liberal functioning of the university that sees to the end of these courses, itself channeling student demand.
At the heart of this argument, if you can dignify it with such a term, is the assumption that an individual or group of individuals with superior qualities of insight, intelligence, comprehension or whatever, have the ability and right to decide what is worthy of general consumption by those less intellectually endowed.
As Katz points out the latest (or only?) incarnation of this process began with Leavis and his considered opinions on literature worthy of the attention of scholars.
Of course our culture is currently infested with critics of every description, advising us what to read, listen to and watch, eat, drink etc etc to the extent that it is difficult to form an opinion independant of the critical hordes.
This obsession has lead to the removal for all practical purposes of any distinction between high and low and replaced it with perhaps the equally fallacious good and bad, complete with star ratings.
Surely it is only the terminally insecure who are still obsessed with high and low, vainly attempting to use it to reinforce their failing sense of intellectual superiority.
Klaus, no doubt that’s a good approach. My criticism of the “semester survey” course designed to give the first years some book lernin’ is the whole Euripides is week 2, Thomas More is week 9 thing. In my view, it’s a waste of time, but I suppose it mollifies those who think that you can’t have an Arts Faculty without “Great Books”.
If I didn’t know better, adrian, I’d say that sounds like you have someone particular in mind.
Klaus, I’m not interested in talking with you at all, because I do not understand you. I think I (sort of) understand your last comment but it means very little to me, as a reader of the classics, and I don’t see any resemblance or connection between it and your comment at #122.
I do like to try and understand language like anyone who comes to this blog. And I have learnt a lot here from people whose knowledge is much deeper than mine. I never have any problem understanding Mark B, e.g., and I don’t believe he explains concepts or offers philosophical arguments that are any less complex than the ones you do.
I’m sorry for the irritation and I won’t comment again on anything you ever write. But nor will I read it. It is demoralising, apart from anything else, to read something that seems to make no sense to me when I do believe the author is being sincere.
Jinmaro, I cannot help but feel that you are being disingenuous here. You offer harsh criticism – ie that I have nothing of substance to say, or am incapable of expressing myself – and then partially accept my attempt to clarify, but only to further suggest that I am being inconsistent. If this is not simply an attempt to provoke, then I don’t know what it is? You are cutting off every gesture I try to make in good faith towards you.
Just as well you know better, Mark!
I thought you were probably talking about Christopher Pearson, adrian.
Which comment was it that you didn’t understand? I don’t have the comments numbered on the screen in front of me (I’m not sure why this is). Perhaps this is the source of the problem?
Christopher who?
On the Saturday Salon thread, in a response to Graham Bell, I did make the point that, to me, good writing must involve clarity.
Jinmaro, don’t be discouraged by those who seem to be competing with each other to see how many long, technical, obscure words they can fit into their rambling sentences!
Jinmaro, counting from the bottom of the page I can see that it is another comment of mine that you objected to. To clarify then: I am having a very specific argument with John Greenfield about points he makes a little further up the thread (about Barthes and intellectuals) and then much further up the thread (about immanence/transcendence and low culture/high culture).
Firstly, I am suggesting that he is wrong about Barthes, and trying to score cheap points against me and some of the others here. Secondly, I was saying that I don’t understand where ‘transcendence’ is supposed to be in a piece of music, and that his examples of near-transcendence in popular music don’t make sense to me, being instances of musical pathos through evocative chord-changes.
Come off it Dan (and jinmaro). If you want to read a thread about high/low culture, you’ve got to expect language that expresses precise and specific concepts about the subject. If you don’t follow the argument, it may not be the fault of the author.
I found nothing difficult to understand in any of Klaus’s comments, nor do I expect other people’s contributions to be dumbed down.
Liam, I thought this was a blog not a post-graduate university class.
Some rello of Noel’s I guess.
Klaus, since I first came across this way of writing, with the advent of post-modernism, I’ve always loathed and objected to it. Firstly, because I can’t understand it, even when it is talking about things I have a view on, am very interested in and have knowledge about. And secondly, because it does seem designed not to communicate (which is the primary goal surely) but rather impress with its linguistic difficulty. Isn’t form important too?
I know some in the academy do write this way deliberately, and worse, require their students write this way too. That does make me angry. I think if you boil down what it being said in many instances of this, by translating into clear, plain English, often the content is far less than the verbiage would suggest.
Do you not acknowledge this as a problem at all in the humanities? I’m far from the first person to raise this, you know.
I first came across this language in left politics in the 1980s. I don’t have any tertiary qualifications. Many of us at the time, including university students and even teachers, labelled it, not undeservedly I think, intellectual terrorism.
It’s been a while since I’ve seen such a textbook case of it as I do often in your writing on this blog. I think it is anti-democratic and elitist to communicate in this way. I think people who wish to teach or persuade should always try to make themselves as comprehensible as possible to the largest possible audience. I don’t believe that it’s impossible to do this, regardless of the subject. Many brilliant scholars achieve it and are to be commended and emulated for doing so.
It has nothing to do with dumbing down.
It is a very important question, in my view.
Take it to the open thread then please. It may be important, but the meta-commentary aspect of it has taken this thread off topic.
I put this in good faith: I’m happy to clarify my comments here or anywhere else. But the terms under which that clarification is requested must also be in good faith. One way in which this could be conveyed could be to address me directly, without abuse, and ask what I meant.
For the record, I don’t mind bewilderment, puzzlement, disappointment, incomprehension (so long as it is mild), the identification of logical inconsistencies or fallacious reasoning, even disputing the tone, style, or grammar in reasonable terms, the rejection of a concept or the making of an amendment to my arguments, bemusement (to a degree), amusement (if I wrote something funny, or wrote in a funny way), paraphrasing, rephrasing, quotation, citation and, of course, disagreement. I don’t like, but am occasionally guilty of point-scoring, snide meta-commentary, personal insult, imputing intentions to others, hyperbole, reduction to the absurd, hubris, stereotyping etc.
Kim, I thought Jinmaro’s point highlighted aspects of ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture perfectly!
Such Is Life. Poor Fellow My
ReaderCountry. Much of David Foster, most of Marion M Campbell, and nearly all of Gerald Murnane.Ag, nice comparison b/w The Secret River and Carpentaria there. Another useful point of comparison with the Grenville book is Kim Scott’s Benang (as suggested by Paul Salzman, who I believe has written about it somewhere).
“Hasn’t film been a disappointment?”
Spoke by a man who is obviously ignorant of film.
Try Bresson, Welles, Hawks, Godard, Hitchcock, Rossellini, Keaton, Melville, Rivette and many other others, if you want to experience some great films. Cinema is an art from where the difference between high and low art totally collapses.
You’re alos obvioulsy ignorant of any film theory either.
I can only concur with Klaus. Your high/low dicotomy is based on a flimsy premise which falls apart at the lightest of touches. I suspect it actually comes down to what you like/dislike, but you feel the need to dress it up otherwise.
Sorry about the typos above. I’m a sad, bad typist.
The discussion about language/genre has been continued over here by Liam:
http://larvatusprodeo.net/2008/01/05/saturday-salon-126/#comment-425206
Which is where I’d like it to stay, as I agree it’s off topic for this thread.
And I disagree that any commenter here should feel under any obligation to justify their style of writing.
Or David’s brother.
Twisting things may run in the family.
Poor Fellow My Reader/ Country
Couldnt agree more Pav. Always wanted to read it, picked it up several times. Blanched at the density, winced at the length – then scarpered.
I mean, its not like I apply the three-paragraph rule (TM) to literature. But seriously! Why cant art be more concise.
Im a bit of a hurry you know.
Sorry, Christopher’s brother should appear here
The closest I came to reading ‘Poor Fellow’ was skimming through it for thinly-veiled references to certain NT administrators while working as a research assistant. It’s on my ‘one day, maybe’ list at the moment. I liked ‘Capricornia’ though, and find Herbert a fascinating fellow indeed. I’ve read his biography and letters, also.
What a clan, adrian!
“It is for this reason the Australian Aborigines did not have a civilisation when humanity’s most advanced civilisation – Great Britain – came calling in the late eighteenth century: ‘Culture’ in the much less material, much less physical, much less pindownable sense. Of course ’Culture’ certainly can, and overwhelming does, rely on the accoutrements of civilisation, but is not defined by them.”
This among all of John G’s self-conscious, confused, abused, adulterated, badly imitative Camille Paglia rip-off, and the touching name dropping and the, in the final analysis, contentless and critique-free meanderings spread forth like a wormy Persian carpet for our approval above, reveals the depth of his ignorance and obtuseness.
Actually, I feel sorry for someone whose understanding of culture is so impoverished and exclusionary, when John G, from all he’s told us, has obviously been provided with every opportunity to fling wide the casements, and enjoy, and share, the awe.
Can someone fill me in one what names JG was dropping? Seems to have gone over my head.
The definition of culture used or implicitly held on this thread is an extremely narrow one and therefore highly inaccurate. Definitional accuracy (as well as linguistic clarity) is of the essence in intellectual and philosophical matters: this is pretty much ABC for any good (or respected) scholar, or one worth employing to teach others how to think critically.
If people don’t even understand what culture is then they really are not in a position to even discuss it – sensibly that is.
This would be my (rough) definition.
Culture is a way of understanding our world – the way we live in and remember our world, be it through expressions of song, music, dance, art, poetry or stories. It is how we relate to the environment and use medicinal remedies. It includes methods of learning and the acquisition of scientific knowledge. It is religion and how we understand the spiritual world. It is the way we behave and how we organise our families, communities, and society through social rules, customs, lore and laws; and it is also language. Culture is what makes one group of people different from another. Cultures change and evolve just like animals and plants do – culture is a living thing.
jinmaro @ #145:
Firstly, because I can’t understand it, even when it is talking about things I have a view on, am very interested in and have knowledge about. And secondly, because it does seem designed not to communicate (which is the primary goal surely) but rather impress with its linguistic difficulty.
Well, you may valorise ‘clarity’, but in a general sense the so-called ‘classic’, Enlightenment, and high modernist writers all endeavoured to _challenge_ readers. A challenge to thought forces one to think anew, something different is brought into the world; hence, thought is an immanent operation of itself. The simplest expression of this is Kant’s reworking of the sublime dimension of Ideas that forced one to mobilise and increase the capacity of one’s imagination. (Deleuze basically extends this further by isolating the immanent and ‘problematic’, rather than the Kantian ‘regulative’, character of Ideas.)
By refusing contemporary intellectual output and deploying the ‘reified stupidity’ defence (“i don’t understand it, therefore it must not be of value”) by focusing only on the so-called ‘classics’ you are effectively doing the _opposite_ of thinking. Instead you are snuggling up to the affective comfort of the well worn cliche. This sort of lazy lack of thinking has traditionally been associated with popular low cultures. One an affective level it is clear the knee-jerk defence of classics proffered here is more popularist, in this regard, than belonging to any ‘high’ intellectual culture.
If most defenders of classics in this thread were to turn around, and turn most of their respective arguments on their respective heads, to suggest that it is not at all a question of enjoyment but is instead a question of mobilising and increasing the reader’s capacity for imagination then there certainly is a place for classics, at least the high modernist kind. But a valorisation of enjoyment over the challenge is anti-modernist, and a kind of anti-intellectual tribalism.
Of course, although challenges are not necessarily about ‘enjoyment’, they can be captivating, hence we have ‘enthusiasts’ of ‘classics’…
Also, I have responded in a tangential fashion on my blog to this post, looking at the intersection of the ‘ocker’ and creative output in the context of Max Harris’ work on ‘Ockers’: http://eventmechanics.net.au/?p=1037
While I agree that conceptual clarity is vital, jinmaro, what you’re doing is proposing the anthropological definition of culture – one of the slipperiest words there is, incidentally, and old Raymond Williams wrote very well on its various incarnations and meanings. However, the more restricted definition is clearly the one being used by most commenters on this thread, and it’s an appropriate one for the purposes of discussing the study in question, though I note that Barbara a long way up the thread is spot on about how well Bourdieu was able to link in the narrower meaning of culture with the broader anthropological meaning through his concept of habitus.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habitus_(sociology)
So I don’t see your point as having made a valid critique of many of the comments on this thread.
jinmaro, for a definition of culture I am using see this except for Raymond Williams’ _Keywords_ http://anilpinto.blogspot.com/2007/11/raymond-williams-culture-popular.html
But once we go beyond the physical reference, we have to recognize three broad active categories of usage. The sources of two of these we have already discussed: (i) the independent and abstract noun which describes a general process of intellectual, spiritual and aesthetic development, from C18; (ii) the independent noun, whether used generally or specifically, which indicates a particular way of life, whether of a people, a period, a group, or humanity in general, from Herder and Klemm. But we have also to recognize (iii) the independent and abstract noun which describes the works and practices of intellectual and especially artistic activity. This seems often now the most widespread use: culture is music, literature, painting and sculpture, theater and film.
Glen, ugly. pretentious language is really not worth reading. I will email it around work and savour its deconstruction.
I could say what you said in one sentence and it still be an unremarkable cliche.
Trying that wikipedia link to habitus again.
And Barbara’s comment was at 54.
would still be
I’ve never had any trouble understanding glen. I’ve gained something from the point about Kant. What he wrote is certainly neither a cliche nor reducible to one sentence.
And I’ll repeat yet again that I said this “discussion” about language is off topic as far as I’m concerned, and if it is to continue at all, it should do so on the open thread.
It would be nice if occasionally people could take some notice.
It would be much easier for me to place offending comments in the moderation bin, go away for a few hours and then delete them all en masse, and that’s what I’ll do if people don’t show any respect for my request.
“ugly. pretentious language is really not worth reading. I will email it around work and savour its deconstruction.”
Is that recursive sentence designed to self-destruct in 15 seconds? I hope so.
“I could say what you said in one sentence and it still be an unremarkable cliche.”
Okay, let’s see you say what glen did in one sentence then, jinmaro.
Let’s not.
I’m fed up with this. I’m also very annoyed by Wolfe/jinmaro/whoever’s habit of changing moniker to avoid moderation decisions, which I don’t think shows much good faith.
Liam
And I’m unclear as to what Glen’s westiness has to do with anything, John
Beats me, too. So why are you introducing it into my post?
unless you’re using your own idealised Western Sydney social class as evidence of privileged experience within categories, in the Joan Scott sense of the term, to buttress your argument.
OMG! Hun, are kidding us? You mean, me, my family, my friends, the community I grew up in, the vast majority of Australians, and people throughout history did not and do not exist without recourse to some “Joan Scott,” whoever she is/was. Tell Joan Scott to give me a ring, and I can introduce her to the source material for Chrissy Amphlett’s Boys In Town
You ought to read a bit of Anthony Smith or Ben Anderson on nationalism
You sanctimonious snotty bourgeois little turd. Do you have any idea how moronic you sound. YOU are the problem. Check out this howler
to the streets, a concept that’s chocked full of contempt for ordinary people’s appreciations of the culture they live in.
So working class experience of suburban popular culture matters not a jot until we have read these coves?
Performances of effective culture (like AC/DC’s music) appeal to experiences that already exist as universally identifiable artefacts (like shaking all night long). If they didn’t, they wouldn’t be so great.
Where were you during my teenage years!? How clueless of me to have thought I loved/love my popular culture rather than having its “affects” “mediated” to me via some dead Peppie La Pew, decades later. Perhaps only then could I have understood what I was actually doing and listening to while I did it. All my memories, and indeed vinyl and CD collection have turned to dust in the absence of Joan, Anthony, Ben, Irigaray, Derrida, Deleuze, and all the other Peppies!
Jeez. Clearly my post forgot to include ACDC and Rock Music in general. NOT! Oh, and you would do well to know I attend the opera with the same people I then repair to an hotel that has the Radiators, the Clash, and Chisels on the juke box, whereupon we get wasted, trawl sleazy bars, and generally carry on like a character from Jean Genet piece (perhaps a bit too realist for you, sweetie?), all the while quoting from Number 96,, Prisoner, Benny Hill, J’amie King, and Mr. Gee,
You would do well to expand your textual experience and take great steps to jump through the appropriate hoops to acquire some er, er, taste. Your current reliance on parroted Dawking University 1st year Cultistudi tutorials clearly is inadequate to allow you to read what I actually wrote.
It can only help you.
Interesting. So JG can have unmediated access to AC/DC but apparently there’s a need (through the teaching machine) to mediate between readers and the canon? What does that say about this high/low culture distinction?
Too. Much. Information.
jinmaro
Your attempt at “culture” adds exactly WHAT to what I covered in my post.
Mark
Go back to my post.
“Good taste, the last and vilest of human superstitions, has succeeded in silencing us where all the rest have failed.”
Though on the other hand, JG’s self-identification as J’amie and Mr Gee is actually probably relevant.
But, luvvie, you’re no Querrelle.
Admittedly taken out of context, but the point stands in a way. Apparently it is in poor taste to discuss culture beyond sanctioned enthusiasms.
Oooh, ooh, freestyle flaming. From here things can only get better (ie. worse).
Yours, I assume. Pare back the fluster and you flush out a snob, transparently bent on scraping up enough “high” culture artefacts to ingratiate himself.
Pathetic, JG. You’re a one-man suckhole conga line.
“Too. Much. Information.”
But. Still. The. Same. Old. Crap.
I just knew Princess Tinymeat would namecheck Genet sooner or later. He clearly fancies himself as some kinda self-made streetwise intellectual vagabond, challenging the academy with his working class vitality, Bukowsking around in the gutter while reaching for the stars.
Makes you wonder then why he’s at such pains to present himself online as a precious, self-conscious, intellectually incoherent and desperately attention-seeking little party boy.
Now here’s a pomo poser. Is he a poseur being a wanker or a wanker being a poseur?
False dichotomy, Nabs.
Binaries are so mo in the era of pomo.
You’ll find JG in the “excluded middle”. To be Hegelian.
Well Joan Scott basically spent her career trying to demolish culturalist marxism’s “experience” as a valid basis for epistemological certitude, arguing that ‘experience’ itself is constituted by language, ordered and given meaning discursively yada yada. I thought she overstated her case, and ended up privileging intellectual knowledge over all others.
But anyway, dare I suggest this debate is much like any old academic stoush: with two ( maybe 2.5; counting the new “anti-wank wankers” school of hard knox) cultural studies/ critical theory schools in conflict?
The idea that certain commentators here have more ‘authentic’ access to the Clapham omnibus of everyday cultural experience is the only punchline.
Chuckle.
École Shower?
“The idea that certain commentators here have more ‘authentic’ access to the Clapham omnibus of everyday cultural experience is the only punchline.”
That’s not what I felt from the ordinary salt of the earth common people just trying to make a living in Munster Lager.
Nabakov
You do take your blog “relationships” very badly, don’t you dear? On every thread you inevitably start carrying on like the Hatfields don’t you? Forever guarding your little piece of cyberspace against, “what” exactly? Invading McCoys? One hopes and prays that you are not involved in education!
Perhaps a night out at the Horden Pavillion, partying to Joe Smooth witha few eckies down your gills, might cure you.
Dude, it’s a blog. Grow up.
Poor luv.
Lefty E
While I more or less agree, while I am actually travelling on the Clapham omnibus, I doubt Lord Denning would require the testimony of those who have never been anywhere said bus, such as the Peppie La Pews so inexplicably and tragically used as pacifiers and blankets by these Cultistuides types.
These cultural skimishes are so civilised. Can’t imagine how they ever escalate into full-blown Culture Wars.
Pirate Queen: [Though on the other hand, JG’s self-identification as J’amie and Mr Gee is actually probably relevant.
But, luvvie, you’re no Querrelle.]
Ouch.
No matter how brilliantly a late bloomer performs, Johnny Matelot, or how many of his HDs he feels compelled to keep boasting about; upon life’s ocean, there are no safe harbours.
Oh, don’t give yourself any more airs, you silly little man.
I take you as seriously as a cat takes a well punctured mouse. And if the LP mods take you away from me (“No! Don’t! I’m still picking my teeth with that leg.”), I’m sure more will scurry along.
After all I’m not the one who came along here looking to provoke attention and start fights, only to start throwing tanties when they got laughter instead of applause and then dumped on their arse.
“Dude, it’s a blog. Grow up”
You really have absolutely no self-awareness of how you really come across do you?
” … the Peppie La Pews so inexplicably and tragically used as pacifiers and blankets by these Cultistuides types.”
JG, without even beginning to understand what this is supposed to mean, I would like to point out that if you are referring to a certain erotomanic cartoon skunk created by Chuck Jones, his name is spelled Pepé Le Pew.
Incidentally, if you ever decided to obtain a gravatar, I would venture that a picture of Pepé would be a highly appropriate choice.
By the way, in doing due-diligence research for this comment, to make sure that I was not about to mis-spell the name myself and end up looking a total prat, I discovered the following:
“In the French version of Pepé le Pew, Pépé le putois, Pépé is an Italian skunk with a strong Italian accent.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pep%C3%A9_Le_Pew
God I love Wikipedia!
“Peppie La Pews” refers to post-WWII French philosophers, I think.
In the Israeli version is Porkie the Pig circumcised?
nabs, kim, lefty e, ec,
a tick in every box:
http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/narcissistic-personality-disorder/DS00652/DSECTION=2
On my computer – I don’t know if its happening on otherts – comments on this thread are overprinting and impossible to read. Also happened on Missy Higgins thread.
Wow, jo, that’s really uncanny, isn’t it.
Paulus, careful — he gets very antsy when his spelling is corrected. IIRC, Pepé le Pew was blissfully unaware of his effect on other people, too.
“It is for this reason the Australian Aborigines did not have a civilisation when humanity’s most advanced civilisation – Great Britain – came calling in the late eighteenth century: ‘Culture’ in the much less material, much less physical, much less pindownable sense. Of course ’Culture’ certainly can, and overwhelming does, rely on the accoutrements of civilisation, but is not defined by them.â€?
John G, the equating of culture with civilisation is completely wrong. I have Aboriginal ancestry as well as Irish and Scottish. I object specifically to the European ethnocentrism of such a view and the wastefulness of its dismissal of rich cultural life disparate communities developed in this in many ways inhospitable continent. We are a remarkable species, no? And our culture, and I believe it is part of human culture, not to be relegated to the status of minor tribal offshoot, is still barely understood. I don’t think it ever will be. It is perhaps too late. But I marvel at it and what we are all still learning about it.
I think the sensitive response to and appreciation of Nature, to all that is external to us, to all life on earth, human and other, is the first and most important manifestation of human culture. And I don’t just mean historically. I mean for every individual human being alive today, in the past and in the future. I think the culture wars did encompass opposed views of Nature, climate change denialism being the most extreme example of this from the warriors of the Right (for want of a better word).
But I’m not aware of the explicit incorporation of this in the terms of the “culture wars” debate as generally discussed, by any faction.
That is uncanny – I know a few people with some or many of those characteristics, but to tick all the boxes…
I think that LP is performing a community service. Perhaps there’s a grant of some sort that Mark can apply for.
Seems a working diagnosis Jo!
…match the poster! – the next one, perhaps a borderline borderline, or rather tendencies to:
http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/borderline-personality-disorder/DS00442/DSECTION=2
“nabs, kim, lefty e, ec,
a tick in every box:”
Not in my case. I only scored myself about 60%.
“In the Israeli version is Porkie the Pig circumcised?”
Ooh, cutting.
And if you’re wondering what happened to Daffy Duck, I reckon he’s now in charge of Jetstar’s reservations centre.I flew ‘em for the first time recently but not again in hurry. “Oh brother, what a way to run an airline.”
Meanwhile I hear Yosemite Sam’s been tapped as the next Chair of the RNC, Bugs Bunny is working as a “consultant” to the Russian Business Network and Wile E. Coyote will continue as a senior White House aide.
Where he will no doubt find many uses for an Acme Instant Rock.
Only 60%
and the Road Runner is the perfect Al Qaeda cell?
Declared bankrupt John “Groper” Elliott is undergoin’, ah say undergoin’ courtin’ classes with Foghorn Leghorn. Reckons he could use a little work on his “phwoar”.
“John “Groperâ€? Elliott”
I accidentally walked into his son’s 40th birthday at the Blue Diamond about a week after the Federal Election.
The room was full of disconsolate Toorak/Hawthorn/Kew liberals getting shitfaced and saying things like “Latham vs Costello, now that’d be a contest” and “Is this your wife?”.
Then old Pig’s Arse (looking old and small in an equally crumpled bespoke suit that no longer fit him) got up and made the worse speech I’ve heard in a long time. He started out with “Will all the bloody women shut up. Christ, you just keep talking and fucking talking don’t you?” and it went downhill from there.
Drunkenly garrulous, self-pitying, full of snide putdowns of his son and his former girlfriends (who were there) and finishing up with an incoherent toast to something or other. The spattering of applause afterwards was really cringeworthy as well. However his son, who seems to be quite a decent bloke for a hedge fund wrangler (ie: millionaires’ bookie) made a very gracious speech in response.
After that, your correspondent made his excuses and left.
Finally managed to catch up on this “debate” by reading it all through my print preview. I’m intrigued to what extent Warner Bros. cartoon characters have permeated our culture.I have no doubt they are some kind of amalgamation of high and low culture. But I’m addicted to Disney as well, and very pleased at myself for solving a difficult technical problem on my computer.Do the animators become the elites, or are the people the animators create the cartoons for the elitesw, because without them there would be nbo work for the animators? I think this is a serious question about the concept of identity, not sure.
“Do the animators become the elites, or are the people the animators create the cartoons for the elitesw, because without them there would be nbo work for the animators?”
Can’t easily answer that one but I can assure you that whoever owns the copyright to the characters becomes v. rich regardless of who first drew ‘em.
And if the Grimm Brothers and Hans Christian Anderson exercised, massaged and funded copyright provisions the way Disney does, then there’d be no Disney as we know it now.
But hey, on the other hand, much of what we like about Warner Bros cartoons was due to the talent gleefully and creatively wriggling through all the copyright, budget and censorship restrictions imposed on them. Sometimes you need to cage artists to get their juices flowing.
So it’s six of one stonefaced executive or half a dozen Acme firecrackers.
Nabakov,
Yes,
I think that anarchy is what I like about Warner Brothers. And we’ve got Felix the Cat.
Re Disney – what the possibility of no Snow White? On wonders how these various cartoons have shaped our, not America’s culture.What impact, if any they’ve had on our national psyche? Probably if one was overseas they wouldn’t make you homesick, like I imagine Ned Kelly or Waltzing Matilda would. Don’t know about thoughts of Bradman. Howard has tarnished that a bit for me. But people who’ve been there tell me Gallipoli feels like a little bit of Oz. Mind you, they went on Anzac Day. And who made, or how were some of these national symbols made so significant in the first place -Gallipoli aside – Its getting late and my thinking is getting too fuzzy.
“or half a dozen Acme firecrackers”
In some American law schools (including Harvard if I remember right) it used to be a popular moot-court exercise to try the civil suit of Coyote v. Acme Weapons Corp., where Wile E. Coyote was suing Acme for damages for sustained product malfunction. Some of the decisions rendered were a hoot. I believe Ian Frazier (who’s always worth a read) once did a thing on the subject, maybe it’s available online.
“…where Wile E. Coyote was suing Acme for damages for sustained product malfunction.”
He’s a coyote for god’s sake. No opposable thumbs. How the hell can he hold a pen to sign the disclaimers, Terms of Use and End User Agreements? You’ll notice all this action took place well before DNA testing too so it’s not like his lawyers can prove physical linkage anyway. Get real man.
“like I imagine Ned Kelly or Waltzing Matilda would.”
Now there’s a lazyweb idea. A gritty steampunk Ned Kelly cartoon/graphic novel character. Ironman meets the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (Colonial Ancillaries).
Speaking of which, I got this for Xmas and fuck my copper-lined and muskrat-trimmed boots it is brillant. Alan Moore reckons it’s the best thing he’s ever done and I concur.
It takes the original concept into a whole new dimension where you’ve got the likes of Biggles, Orlando, Harry Lime, Tannhäuser, Big Brother, Fanny Hill, Billy Bunter, Jack Kerouac, Jeeves, James Bond, Nyarlathotep, Bulldog Drummond, the Waterbabies and many more (along with the original cast) all sharing in one way or another cockpits in time, space and the flesh. The whole Wold Newton schmear taken a giant whacky step forwards and sideways.
With Prospero delivering the closing lines in 3D.
Hmm, walking on eggshells here, maybe this will turn out to be a bad idea…
At the risk of waking up this thread and putting it back in a grumpy mood, just when it had passed out quietly into the land of nod, there was a question earlier on that I thought might be worth playing with…
Someone raised the question earlier on, of whether or not there was a good (and reasonably ‘objective’) example in music of the transcendent, qua transcendent, independent of pathos. Obviously to give a good answer, questions of personal taste ought to be kept at arm’s length as much as possible. So I won’t be mentioning Schubert or Schumann (I don’t think they fit the bill strictly anyway, but we all have our weaknesses, so I’m just trying to be fair.)
I think there are indeed such examples, and I would propose The Brandenburg Concertos of J.S. Bach as a very good example.
Be happy to discuss why I’ve pointed to that work in particular, at greater length, if anybody else remains interested in such an abstruse question. If not, then back to sleep, my pretty little thread. Sleeep…
I am certainly interested to know why you’ve chosen that example, j_p_z. It’s been some time since I’ve spent time with Bach, and maybe a commentary on the transcendent qualities of the Brandenburg Concertos will be reason enough to seek them out once more…
Wolfe
John G, the equating of culture with civilisation is completely wrong.
Absolutely. As my post explicitly states.
Jo, I don’t think speculating about the mental health of other commenters is particularly helpful.
sorry mark, def. overstepping the bounds.
retract.
Thanks, jo.
Yes you are right, Mark. Some of us got a bit carried away. Apologies to all concerned.
Thanks, adrian.
Interesting post. There’s a certain ‘confusion’ (I need a better word) however.
>
Chan and Goldthorpe’s study says that there is no longer any bourgeois elite class (Urban Haute Bourgeoisie) that goes to the opera and eschews pop culture; on the other hand they say that there is a “Billy Elliot” type phenomena whereby wroking clss people are enthusiastic about cultural forms associated with ‘high culture’.
>
This does not disprove the notion of ‘luvvies’ which Andrew Bolt et al like to promote. Bolt always signs off his blog for the year by telling his readers what good taste they have. He promotes himself as an avatar of such taste by boasting of his enthusiasms for the films of Visconti and the symphonies of Mahler etc. This hardly undermines the idea of:
Does it?
>
The right wing side of the culture wars attacks the extremes of certain ‘postmodern’ notions that attempt to read all cultural products as ‘political’ and that also attempt to reject the canonical view of literature and art as the products of dead white (heterosexual, rich) males backing up the evil patriarchal capitalist hegemony. Altho’ their case is blunt, malinformed, highly caricatured and an attempt to discredit worthwhile historical work that seeks to outline the nastier aspects of history, it’s not without a point.
>
The way I see it there has been a move away from the Western Canon (as envisaged in academia) after WWII because certain intellectualls began to recognize the value of ‘popular forms’ like cinema, jazz etc. These had been poo-poo’d as not worthy by earlier academics. The younger ones, open to new forms like jazz, disagreed. This led to all sorts of polemics like Benjamin’s “Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”, the work of Williams and Eagleton, the early Cahiers du Cinema and so on. Bourdieu’s Distinction was a way of empirically addressing these polemics. However the book, being on French society, would probably not be representative here.
>
At the end of the 20th century we have a smorgasbord of cultural forms and people tend to move freely between them. A cellist may perform a Schubert trio in the afternoon and spend the night shaking it to Hip-Hop. The popular culture/high culture divide is not an accurate way of seeing what’s actually going on. However it still exists in a way because culturally some people are more cultivated than others.
>
This is not necessarilly elitist socio-economically, it’s a matter of taste and effort. Someone who goes to the opera and listens to whatever because they’ve been told it’s good is not as cultivated (I’d argue) as someone who spends hours tracking down the Ettienne de Crecy remix of Air’s ‘Sexy Boy’ (very choice) or rummages for weeks thru old book stores looking for Alan Moore’s The Ballad of Halo Jones. It’s not a question of the mode but of the effort.
>
I believe Bolt’s tastes are pedestrian and conventional. He argues for the reassertion probably out of a resentment similar to but distinguishable from the trendy po mo academic who decries Hamlet as over-rated and is such a thorn in the ample side of Harold Bloom. Trouble is, as Orwell wrote, you cannot prove Shakespeare is a better writer than say, Stephen King. The hierarchies are not sound in the scientific empirical way and cannot be. Time is the only test. In the meantime Bolt’s views are as good as anyone’s.
>
Still there are cultural elites. These elites are those who can influence the culture. Bolt is just as much a member as Philip (bloody) Adams and it’s dishonest for him to say otherwise. I myself think neither of them are interesting enough to justify that influence. In truth the cultural spectrum I think is democratic whereby there are myriad modes of cultural production and one’s cutivation is measured not by the price of the ticket but by one’s own literacy and appreciation. These cannot be bought, they must be acquired thru effort. The positions of the various elites (whether of the art world or Boltaburbia)are not particularly authoritative nor are they even interesting. They are simply exclusive and competing forms of group think.
>
I’d wager that if there was an Aussie version of Distinction the results would show that the truly cultivated are mostly unsung and that both Adams and Bolt were simply two types of beige-brained mediocrities.
Thanks, Adrien. I haven’t yet got around to reading the actual study, and I’m planning to write something longer about it when time commitments allow, and I’ll be most happy to take that feedback into account.
A smorgasboard of cultural forms.
I forgive your wanton usage of “polemic”. I would much prefer “champion of”.
However, this shall not decrease my appreciation for your citation.
You can visit me online if you desire.
Adrien makes a lot of good, salient points. Not that I agree with all of ‘em, but this sort of discourse returns the discussion a lot closer to what I see as its natural center of gravity. Would like to address some of the ideas introduced by Adrien at a later date, when I have more time.
Klaus K — I’ll give a thumbnail version of my reasoning here, because I don’t want to get too wordy (and boy, could I get wordy in this neighborhood!) If interest continues, perhaps the two of us and others could explore the thing at greater length. (btw, I do think it feeds back into the general question of hierarchies in cultural creation and perception, even the so-called high/low dichotomy, which remains an interesting thought experiment.)
A few definitions: I’ve excluded the theological and religious ideas of the transcendent from this, for fairly obvious reasons; I’m working with what is primarily an aesthetic-philosophical (viz., mainly aesthetic, but derived from the philosophical) idea of the transcendent, but also perhaps an idiosyncratic one, as it also derives from my personal experiences with same; there’d be more to say on all this, but I’m trying to keep it brief.
It was, I think, a good idea to exclude pathos, affect, and the pathetic from the general criteria, as it gives a better chance of isolating a laboratory example. Personally I think pathos, or other appeals to human feeling, is a perfectly useful tool for an artist working legitimately in these avenues (Hamlet, ‘Don Giovanni’ and indeed most of Mozart, Schubert and Wagner come to mind), but it’s useful to exclude these things here because they bring up issues of subjectivity and personal taste. I think further helpful criteria are to exclude the specifically verbal (e.g. opera), as well as work with a specific programmatic or subtextual purpose (say, religious music, triumphant music, or the explicitly lyrical).
Two criteria that I think must be specifically *included* are: a sort of general acknowledgment of high excellence by commonly-understood standards, reputation, and assent (f’rinstance I think that ‘Trout Mask Replica’ is transcendent, and I can show you how, but I have no real right to frown if you just plain don’t believe me, since most people don’t). The other is that I think the work must contain some explicit grounding in, and reference to, the broadly human, in terms of its context. Since for our purposes the transcendent is involved in the business of going beyond or above the normally human in experience (and that which is limited by the fact of its individual human-ness), I think the work should explicitly demonstrate that it operates from a base-line understanding of what ‘the human’ is; for this reason a fish, a spider, the rings of Saturn, and Philip Glass’s ‘Night Train’ sequence are all beautiful in their way, but since they don’t participate meaningfully in the human to begin with, we can’t say that they transcend anything specifically and normally human in experience.
I think this last is the key, for the limited purposes of this argument. The Brandenburg Concertos pass all the other tests easily: their excellence is universally admitted, they are (it can be fairly argued) reasonably free of pathos and affect, they are non-verbal and not linked to a specific use or context (they are not religious in nature, for instance). They are about as ‘abstract’ as a work of art can get, in many ways.
And they are largely based on dance-music rhythms. The majority of the work (all the second and third movements, not so much the first movements) are based on popular dance music rhythms; you can still dance to the Brandenburgs if you try, and I wish some enterprising choreographer would revisit them. Dance is a fundamental human physical and spiritual expression. We all know what dancing is, even if we don’t do it or, like Tom T. Hall, can’t do it. We feel it in our bones as humans.
The Brandenburgs start out based on dance music and then leap well beyond it. (You can say this about a lot of 18th-cent. music, but not all of it meets the other criteria.) Through their sheer complexity, and their deep involvement with other ideas like polyphony, key stability and instrumental color, they become about other things besides the human investment in dance, though they rarely lose sight of it. At the same time, their meditations are not pathetic: the slow movements are not about being sad, they are about BEING SLOW, and what slowness is. The lively movements are not about being happy, they are about liveliness as a metaphysical quality. And moreover, as they progress, they become more and more about relationships between states, rather than about the states themselves. This is profoundly transcendent, since we all understand the relationships between things, and yet relationships have no being in themselves. I highly recommend listening to all six concertos in a single sitting, although this is not how they were intended to be performed or received.
Oops, this is a lot longer than I planned. But you get the idea. And if not, no harm done, just ignore me.
The bourgeois sense of identity, as expressed in artistic form, first saw light of day as trauerspiel — bourgeois tragedy.
This development began in England in the lateish 17thC and achieved perhaps its highest form in Germany in the 18thC.
Perhaps the most important unifying element of trauerspiel was the depiction of the protagonist as an outsider, excluded from public affairs. In response to that marginalisation the protagonist found his self-actualisation in the private virtues. Thus the bourgeois was establishing a genuine counter-culture of privacy, probity, thrift, loyalty to family, sentiment in contradiction to prevailing aristocratic and feudal norms.
In that sense, trauerspiel and later bourgeois novels that are much more famous, were also rebellions against the so-called Western Canon of their time. And on a related note it is important to recall just how subversive of the existing order were several of Mozart’s operas.
For this reason I am deeply suspicious of anything that parades itself as be representative of the “Western Canon”. What is deemed to be canonical today was yesterday excluded as being subversive, heretical or treasonous.
And doesn’t it stand to reason that a culture as dynamic and as revolutionary as western culture should also have such an elastic sense of the canonical?
Perhaps, therefore, the only genuine Western Canon consists of productions that tear down or seek to replace that which was canonical at that moment — the self-terminating canon.
j_p_z, thank you for your fascinating response. I’ve returned only to follow up on this thread: having opted out of LP for a few days (partly to meet a deadline), I thought I had better just let you know I’ve read your post since I was the one to ask for it! In the meantime, I’ll try to get my hands on the Concertos, and perhaps we can follow up at a later date…
Well, trauerspiel was largely forgotten and scorned til Benjamin wrote about it, Katz. Which kinda makes your point.
Katz says:
I think this is of the essence of Western Civ. My favourite metaphor for Western Civ. is the Phoenix myth – the magical bird that crashes to Earth and rises again from its own ashes. Eastern history has been the story of one civilization rising and burning out to be replaced by another on its fringes. This also happens within civilizations and is expressed by the art of its time.
>
Mozart was radical, so was Shakespeare. Lots of people decry Shakespeare for his aristocratic personae. Charlie Chaplin famously hated the posh bard, so did Tolstoy. But all of the aristocrats in Shakespeare are flawed humans. This links him to Sophocles another radical.
>
Likewise Euripedes whose Women of Troy is probably the first anti-war ‘film’. Imagine the rage of Athenian ultra-conservatives at Achilles being protrayed as the killer of children. I imagine that such barbs at the Greeks’ most cherished icons might’ve influenced the tenth book of Plato’s Republic where he articulates the first totalitarian philosophy for the arts. The I-don’t-like-what it-says-so-it-ain’t-no-good school of literary criticism. Well practised by Andrew Bolt. Not to mention certain members of the po mo club. For example the UK teacher Jane Hardmon-Brown who declined to take her class to Romeo and Juliet on the grounds of ‘heterosexism’.
>
Interestingly the various and mutually contradictory stew of critical ideas one associates with modern cultural studies is being reconciled with the ‘traditional’ Western Canon in the arts themselves. Anyone who’s a fan of graphic novels will realize this. Modern comics tend to mix the best postmodern ideas with a regard for literary tradition. This is something that isn’t happening in the world of literature where the serious novels are po-mo and the genre stuff is traditional. The theorists mightn’t see the problem but the artists do.
Stanley Kubrick was once asked:
He responded:
I see a move away from the excesses of po mo in the coming decades toward more focus on the ‘classical’ with a view to reintegrating the modernist with what has come before it. Smashing conventions is well and good and necessary at times. But when they’re lying around it various bits it’s time to rebuild something.
>
So you can bust it up all over again later.
Adrien, I think pomo is pretty passe now. It’s just that JG and Kevin Donnelly haven’t noticed.
Well it is and it isn’t Mark. Depending on what you mean by the phrase. I did a subject called Postmodernism (comparative history and literature) at the university at which you teach and it consisted of four guys arguing about what it meant. Fun fun fun.
>
I continue to use it simply ’cause it hasn’t been replaced with anything. And cultural studies with its negative vissicitudes is here to stay. Hopefully, said vicissitudes aren’t. Don’t worry I won’t write another mini-essay on the subject. I’ve said quite a bit elsewhere.
>
Incidentally on ‘legitimate’ art forms (Bourdieu’s term). I was reading one of Hobsbawn’s essays on the history of jazz and its acceptance by intellectuals. It’s kind of hilarious hearing the guy wail about his elders looking down their noses at the ‘jungle music’ of Duke Ellington and then proceeding to denounce rock music as barely music and let’s not even mention hip-hop. I would send him Blackalicous’ Blazing Arrow and maybe Sticky Fingers if I thought it’d do any good.
>
BTW When I say Eastern history, I of course mean Western history; a distinction that is likewise past it.
Adrien, yep, but again there’s a bit of a lag between what’s the cutting edge of what’s written and what’s taught, and you don’t say when you did the subject. I also think cultural studies (or bits of it) is morphing into something a little different.
you don’t say when you did the subject.
‘91
I should add that ‘Cultural Studies’ at GU was excellent. Unfortunately I find that this is often not the case elsewhere especially at the ‘prestige’ unis like Melbourne. I’ve encountered MU post-grads who are avatars for the Boltaburbian ‘Culti Studi’ stereotypes combining the most half-arsed notions about literature etc with a completely unbaked ‘understanding’ of something that is called ‘politics’ without baring any relation whatsoever to politics as it has been experienced on the planet Earth.
>
I welcome studies like Goldethorpe and Chan. Distinction is a great book. More of that and less Judith Butler and Lit Majors might once more be employable.
GU has sort of shifted into cultural sociology now. Though there was always a big element of that, with folks like Andy Bennett (who’s returned) etc.
“If culture means anything, it means knowing what value to set upon human life; it’s not someone with a mortarboard reading Greek. I know a lot of facts, history. That’s not culture. Culture is the openness of the individual psyche…to the news of being.”
Saul Bellow. 1915 – 2005
Dan the Man.
Stand by you have just pulled the pin.
I don’t think so, Phil. The quote doesn’t give much scope for malignant discombobulation!
<i.Culture is the openness of the individual psyche…to the news of being.
Really? Um so Rameses II in building all those monuments was just opening the individual psyche to the news of being?
>
Julius Caeser’s conquests, his calender, his usurpation of the Republic all of which partly made our world was opening the individual psyche to the news of being.
>
Cuisine, couture, sonnets, cinema, the commedia del arte; the dude on the corner playing Dylan songs for change, the latest slang, the latest dance, tongue piercings, tatoos and what the kids do these days for fun in bed are all – opening the individual psyche to the news of being.
>
Opening the individual psyche to the news of being. Beggin’ your pardon sirrah, but, sink me, what the fuck does that mean?
>
How about this: culture is the sum of human activity, habits, customs, dress, techniques of food preparation, governance, morals, beliefs ethics, story-telling, ettiquette – etcetera etcetera etcetera.
“The quote doesn’t give much scope for malignant discombobulation!”
You could try another one of the greats!
“Now that’s a knife”
Crocodile Dundee 1939 – still discombobulating
Under the starters orders,
Adriens looking a bit toey, no sign of any of the others in the field.
Off and racing!
Now look, Adrien, I don’t want to sink you or cause you any harm. And you must keep in mind that I, who occupy a lowly place on the cultural ladder, didn’t make the quote. I merely presented it for your intellectual consideration.
Please indulge me and consider the following:
“Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.” Oscar Wilde.
Are we all just pale imitations of others no matter how much we huff and puff?
Are we all just pale imitations of others no matter how much we huff and puff?
>
Speak for yourself.
>
Here’s another Oscar quote:
My motto.
Ah, but you see, Adrien, the imitation thing leads on the question of whether or not we have free will or are we all simply responding in a conditioned way to life’s little mysteries. That is hardly talking about nothing!
Perhaps this also explains why man and his so-called ‘culture’ has never progressed, at least sociologically, for the last 10,000 years and why we still regularly engage in wars, killing, rape, murder, incest, etc.
An onion has many layers, Adrien, even for academics!
And it’s Dan the Man by a length.Adrian run a good race, but alas was just pipped at the finishing post.Should improve next time out.
Actually it might sound nice, but it’s meaningless. Sounds like vitalist mysticism to me.
How would you use this to allocate arts funding or design a curriculum?
Ah, sweeping statement time.
You’re not aware that there’s a big anthropological and historical debate on the relative cultural meanings and prevalence of violence? That statement is the mirror image of the Whig narrative of progress and just as misleading.
So does “homespun wisdom” or “experience” mean that you can make whatever generalisations you like without providing any evidence or taking into account actual facts? Not impressive, then.
Modern humans are a funny lot. If they were confronted with a car engine for the first time they, in all probability, would remove a spark plug and spend years analysing and arguing about that one part until they knew, or thought they knew, all about it. Of course the relationship between that part and the rest of the motor to many wouldn’t matter. Such is the thrust of most education.
I am not interested in this intellectual debate or that. Fiddling while Rome burns has always been popular. I see the world as it is: a stuffed-up place. I want to see change, for me, for my grandkids. If ‘intellectuals’ had any answers then the situation wouldn’t be so dire.
When are we going to deal constructively with the big, serious issues that beset our world and stop all this intellectual wanking?
Shorter anti-intellectuals:
Whatever I think is right.
Your comment is fundamentally disingenuous for at least three reasons:
(1) You claim some sort of exemption from the canons of argument and debate that exist outside the academy in any space where people reason together;
(2) Its extreme negativity in that you offer no solution for “the big, serious issues” while implying that anyone who tries to wrestle with their complexity is a wanker.
(3) It’s offensive and has nothing to do with the post.
Well my Oscar quote was my attempt at being drier than Mickey Spillaine’s martini. Maybe I should eat my olive. Your Oscar quote is both meaningless and meaningful, this is of the essence of Wilde’s genius. He spun the most profound idle chit-chat ever.
>
He is however one example of a person who was not simply an imitation. And to answer your fate/free will question – it’s both and neither (IMHO). An onion does have many layers, but they all resemble each other only a different size:
Lewis F Richardson after Swift.
>
If you want a picture of fate and free will here’s the latest one and also the one that came before. Now you say:
>
Well I’d argue that wars, rape, incest etc are products of nature. Culture is a way of trying to control this. Being self-aware monkeys we tend to reflect on our horrible behaviour and think perhaps we could be better behaved, hence this exchange. Dogs on the other hand ‘commit’ incest and never think twice about it. Funnily enough it seems to cause them no psychological damage at all, unlike us.
>
Still we aren’t all that much better than we used to be. But on the plus side we have more channels and really gnarley t-shirts.
Onya, Mark!
Dan I notice they have still missed your point about original thought,
All truth passes through three stages.First it is ridiculed, secondly violently opposed and lastly accepted as being self evident.
Schopenhauer.
And Dan I never see any evidence about anything here, just a load of “Generalizations” And we all know what a fact is !
So, I eagerly await the revelation of some of these original thoughts. Just sayin…
I don’t think “intellectuals are teh stoopid” counts as original.
Yep, come on, dazzle us with some of these original thoughts and exciting facts.
/waiting
/still waiting
“I don’t think “intellectuals are teh stoopidâ€? counts as original.
And neither do I Mark.And like you I have had my credentials questioned,It’s a bummer to be sure.
Still we aren’t all that much better than we used to be. But on the plus side we have more channels and really gnarley t-shirts. Top observation, Adrien.
Now I suppose I really should provide twenty links, thirty footnotes and an extensive bibliography to support my comment. But I don’t think I’ll bother!
I finished being an undergraduate some time ago.
Woah, I checked back on this thread after a couple of days and look where its morphed to.
>
Some intelligent comments by Adrien appear to have saved the day.
>
I don’t normally endorse Will Hutton but I’ve been re-reading his The Writing on the Wall about China recently. Hutton’s key point is the strength of “the west” (sorry to use that term but Mr Hutton just lurves it) is related to its pluralism.
>
It seems to me that the po-mo / high culture / low culture debate is one trope of this pluralism. As you let more viewpoints and cultural artefacts in past the gatekeepers, it starts to get harder to construct a linear narrative of your society and culture – which is roughly the point JF Lyotard was making when the Canadian Govt asked him to define po-mo and he came up with his famous line about “incredulity towards meta-narratives.”
>
As John Gray points out, the conservative movement struggles with this kind of no-story-ness, partyl because at the kernel of conservatism there is a belief in the immutability of “human nature” and partly because, well, God, King, Country et al are all meta-narratives.
>
Liberalism faces some of the problems from the opposite direction” for instance, how to reconcile the concept of universal human rights with the sheer crazy diversity of global cultures, in the anthropological and artistic senses. This is why conservatives have found it so easy to take pot-shots at the cultural relativism of post-modernist discourses, without stopping to ask themselves just why so many people respond to relativism’s siren appeal.
>
I think in the end this is why the culture wars are more relevant than Mark is prepared to believe. They reference a fundamental disjunction in contemporary thought between conservative mono-theism and its millenarian belief in the coming Rapture, and the wary scepticism of a modern liberalism which can’t decide where to jump when faced with the unravelling Enlightenment Project.
“And neither do I Mark.And like you I have had my credentials questioned,It’s a bummer to be sure.”
Phill, what credentials do you have that were questioned? I missed that exchange.
Interesting point, Ben, thanks. As I said I’ll be writing more about this so I’ll have a think on it.
Thanks Mark.
>
The other point I’d make in this respect is the role of science in constantly shifting the playing ground “culture” is fought over. You can see this in current affairs in everything from Terry Schiavo to stem cells to the gay gene debate and on up to Dawkins and E.O. Wilson.
>
But interestingly, these fields are perhaps best explored by post-modernist 90s science fiction novelists like Iain M Banks and Greg Egan. Egan took his cue from gender theory to push assumptions about what gendered identity might mean past their biological limits.
>
Banks did nothing less than invent an entire inter-stellar civilisation – a kind of Enlightenment Project with starships and sexy drug glands. He called it … The Culture.
Cheers, Ben – I’ve got some Egan and Banks books in the “to read” pile as a matter of fact.
Phill, what credentials do you have that were questioned? I missed that exchange.
I have a PhD from the university of a long and productive life.I also have a builders license, not relevant to this discussion,sounds good but..I am not going to trawl back through the crappola here to see where I was insulted,just take my word for it.
Now Kim when my question is answered, I will give you some original thoughts you have been eagerly anticipating.
Question 1. What tangible good is a PhD in one of the humanities going to do for Joe Bloggs in the street.Now I don’t want any old PhD I want to know what you have contributed to society.
I don’t have a PhD.
However, it would do some tangible good if you and Dan the Man were able to talk about the topic of this thread. I think we get that you don’t think much of book lernin.
Either show how what you are saying is relevant to this topic, or refrain from making the same point over and over, please. And it’s considered good practice, when you’re in a discussion, to argue on topic and responsively to others’ points.
What Kim said.
This thread has a specific topic, and a lot of the contributions indicate that a lot of people are interested in discussing it. Further comments should be on topic or they’ll breach the comments policy.
As I expected Kim,you have nothing except insults,and like Dan I wont play your mind games.About book learning my dear what you know about anything would fit nicely on the back of a postage stamp.End of discussion.
Thanks for clearing that up for me Phill.
Somehow I had got it into my mind that your credentials were as “a world citizen (born in Australia), a pragmatic peace activist, an amiable atheist, a folksy farmer and a seeker of truth with a background in education, psychology and journalism who has authored several books and short stories.”
Still even if those were your credentials what could I say? I guess you’d say “Nothing special!”
“Still even if those were your credentials what could I say? I guess you’d say “Nothing special!â€?”
And this is on topic is it? Look my friend I have you sussed easy,your another would be if you could be.The the little education you probably do have, like most on this blog,I probably paid for it.
Phill, which of your contributions to this thread have been on topic and not just as booster for your mate Dan, ridiculing those who sought to challenge or engage with him?
But your last point is half right. I do in fact have a very good education, all from a Group of Eight university, and you paid for half of it and heavily subsidised the rest.
I think it’s impossible to read what Kim wrote in any fair minded sense as an insult.
I’m getting fed up, as should have been evident over the past few days, with people who flagrantly disregard moderation requests in order to make some idiosyncratic point about their own beliefs or views. This is the last warning to stay on topic. The comments policy was posted very deliberately the other day and it specifically says:
It also says:
Please take note. This is the last warning and I won’t enter into any discussion about this.
I may, I just may have to use this “HTML Link” as an example of The Social Simulacra of the Internet (“teh Internet”, as it were?) in my most up-to-the-minute writings on my personal bewilderment at “The Modern State”.
I have ardent interest in all of you as your “Virtual Embodiments”, speaking in this forum in both academic and conversation realms.
Regards,
Walter Benjamin
Chan and Goldethorpe’s conclusions actually remind me of From Bauhaus To Our House by Tom Wolfe. The book traces the objectives of the Bauhaus designers in the 20s to create a workers/socialist aesthetic. This involved a lot of minimalism and geometric looking furniture etc. From the 50s onward when the working class began to afford their own homes they rejected the Bauhaus/avant-garde aesthetic in favour of traditional architecture and desidn motifs like the Tudor villa or the Roccocco lounge. It was wealthy trendoids from Manahattan etc who adopted the Bauhaus aesthetic. The workers design school ironically became the post-war coutour.
>
Camille Paglia also recalls teaching night-school for adults working in a factory and remembers that they were interested in canonical type stuff like Homer and Shakespeare.
>
Goldthorpe and Chan’s work is hardly startling. The ‘elites’ commonly referred to in tabloid commentary are not those who attend traditional established arts so much as pursue the ‘avant-garde’. Bourdieu’s way of describing the high art/popular art dichotomy was that there were two fields of cultural production: the restricted and the general.
>
Stuff produced in the general field of cultural production requires little cultural ‘capital’ to appreciate. It is generally accessible. The restricted field of cultural production requires cultural capital on the part of the audience/reader/viewer to fully understand. So for example in a Simpsons episode where Homer falls on his butt – that’s general; but in that same episode where there’s a clever visual reference to a Hitchcock film – that’s restricted. We don’t need to be particularly cine-literate to laugh at slapstick, but we need to know Hitchcock’s films to get the reference based stuff.
>
These terms in my opinion aren’t exactly adequate to the task, but they’re a good start.
>
The cultural elites decried by Boltaburbians are usually people who consume culture in the restricted fields. They attend arthouse cinemas, like ‘weird’ art etc. Bolt et al rain down on this stuff as trash. Of course once it becomes mainstream (safe) and has stood the test of time these very same people congratulate each other for their good taste in patronising it.
>
The ‘elitism’ in culture has little to do with the money or prestige. The yuppie-philistine attending the opera, despite not particularly liking music and not really understanding why Beethoven is better than Britney Spears, does so because it’s a mark of prestige. It’s not really cultural elitism so much as material elitism expressed as the consumption of a cultural product. Cultural elitism is more about the consumption of the restricted mode of cultural production. Hence the disdain by inner-city scenesters for band’s who are ‘commercial’, the contempt of Hollywood by the haute-fartsy artsy in favour of anything in a foreign language etc.
>
This does not mean they have good taste so much. It can be just another form of snobbery.
Ag
Thanks for your words of encouragement. However, I do not “ask for it.â€? One of the great – if unpleasant – insights I have got from LP and similar blogs is the cruel reality of what I call “discursive terrorismâ€? typical of Leftist Culture Warriors. But that is a WHOLE different post. I am intrigued by this “ficto-criticalâ€? genre you mention. And who are these “post-Cultistudiesâ€? types? I’m now VERY intrigued. It has provoked me to write some more shit in that style. Even if only to make Pussy Feel Good Nabakov blow another gasket.
However, I want to address your points re the Arnoldian Project (shall we call it “AP� from now on? J
I also went to High School in the 1980s, before the barbarians descended. While you are correct to note the existence of ’literature as civilising’ trope, it was not necessary for a justification of that curriculum, which I argue can be justified on purely practical grounds. It did force one to read people who actually wrote beautifully constructed sentences, used powerful metaphors, and so on, that we ourselves might use or be inspired by in our everyday communication. I am particularly passionate about this for working-class and indeed all subaltern types, because it enfranchises one outside the rough and ready demands of survival on the margins. A breather from Ribald, Bawdy, and Rugby League Week if you will.
As I said above, much of my passionate objection to the postit Ghastlies is that they are constructing the Road to Barbarism; encouraging a return to medievalism, whereby the vast majority of cultural serfs will be locked out of HC – which will be transmitted by only the most elite private schools and universities – just like the Dark and Middle Ages.
For people in Macquarie Fields, Sunshine, etc to be taught the Romantic poets, be exposed to Hamlet’s anguish, and the felicitous locutions of Jane Austen’s observations on the – otherwise breathtakingly tedious – machinations of early 19th century English gentry can surely only be a bonus on top of what is being produced and reproduced outside the school gate.
It is a crime to argue, “these people should be taught more ’relevant’ things to their day to day lives, such as bus-tickets and the ethics of turkey-slapping. It will give them self-esteem.� What patronising onanistic nonsense. Even on a political level AP is justified as it develops critical skills and in the argot that will bring a smile to the Luvvie, the chance to see “Self in Other.�
The culture-war heat over the last few years about English curricula, at seconday and tertiary levels, seems to turn on a sense of lost literary value, and as a consequence, lost contact with the best that has been thought and said (Arnold’s project).
I think you are right here, but it is a justifiable lament.
On the one hand the stakes are about gatekeeping positions: who gets to decide what has cultural value; which producers-authors are authorised to produce valuable culture.
Again, you are right that there are some forces threatened their gatekeeper role might be usurped, but again, we can still support AP without necessarily supporting the gatekeepers. I think if we looked at High School English syllabuses from 1950 to 1990, we would find a HUGE number of texts being offered, far too wide to support a ’gatekeeper’ hegemony.
But the values themselves are important
No they are not. I agree with Oscar Wilde, “there is no such thing as a moral or immoral book. Books are well written or badly written.� And there would be few more thoroughly drenched in AP than Wilde!
In my field of OzLit a novel like Grenville’s ‘The Secret River’ can be evaluated against Alexis Wright’s ‘Carpentaria’. Both are concerned with frontier conflict and the possibilities of reconciliation.
If these books are about pop slogans like “Reconciliation� they have no place on the school syllabus. Kids deserve a break from contemporary pamphleteering, most of which will end up in history’s trash can. Much better books would be Katharine Sussanah Pritchard’s Coonardoo, Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mocking Bird each of which I read in high school. Of course, the first great “Self in Other� work of literature was Homer’s The Iliad, but I digress.
If you want kids to deal explicitly with contemporary debates, save it for Civics, or deal with it if it comes up incidentally through novels, plays, and poems. Do not start the curriculum with a desired political outcome and then cherry pick texts that will serve that political agenda. Better than Grenville is the study of actual, you know, er, History! You should read the diabolical Nazism in current English curricula. VERY scary!
Klaus/Katz/Mark
Klaus K
Yes, very amusing, John Greenfield, but said wag was a cheap point-scorer who knew nothing of Barthes
I am sure Andreas Huyssens – Professor of German and Comparative Literature at Columbia Univeristy – 1984 article “Mapping the post-modernâ€? in that rag – New German Critique – to which only illiterates and philistines contribute, will be crushed that he “knows nothing of Barthes!â€? Given Professor Huyssens’ fluency in six languages – including French – should I forward him your contact details so you might give him a tutorial?
According to the model put forward by glen
As I said, glen’s model is only accessible by the new bourgeois gatekeepers, to which you perhaps aspire? While they peer through their opera spectacles at the great unwashed burping, farting, and hooning before translating into Peppe Le Pew (though mediated through the English language gobbledegook of several Dawkins University types), the Great Unwashed must remain sequestered in their forums of burping, farting, and hooning. The Pepes nibble on nouvelle cuisine, while their subjects of vivisection woof down meat and potatoes.
Katz
But Paulus, no one talked much about canons etc until F. R. Leavis came along.
While this might be true, it does not mean that canons were only created with Leavis. In fact, canons have existed since at least fifth century BCE Greece and China. Plato spends much time advocating a change of canon suitable for his philosopher-ruled Republic. He specifically wanted to banish Homer and the tragic poets! In Republican Rome, during the first century BCE, all students were prescribed the same curriculum to be taught in the same order: grammar, logic, rhetoric, arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music. Attic Greek was at the centre. By the late fourth century CE this sort of education had declined. St. Augustine was one of the few who still received such an education.
Canons existed throughout Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, and of course the rediscovery of Attic (and Koine) Greek manuscripts changed the canon once more during the Renaissance. Shakespeare himself was schooled in Latin, rhetoric, and such. Edward Said wrote a whole book on the European canon – Orientalism – from the eighteenth to twentieth centuries; a canon, Said himself, was exclusively educated in. Australia’s first university – Sydney – was established (1850s I think)with a fixed curriculum: Mathematics, Theology, Classics (Greek and Latin)
Mark
Until the early 1950s a politician could quote the Bible and expect people to know what he was alluding to. No longer.
And that’s a problem? Why?
Mark, Western Culture is incomprehensible without The Bible!. Try understanding Derrida without it! His whole shtick against logocentrism is rooted in his anti-Christianity. It is also the source of his gravest errors. I am still only nudging my way through him, but I think I have got his number already, and there is absolutely no way any person can competently read Derrida without knowledge of The Bible and Attic Greek. From what I have read of Derrida so far, throwing him at kids who have little exposure to challenging literature, particularly poetry, let alone absolutely no exposure to Greek, Latin, or French, psychology, philosophy, history, and so on is just a WOFTM. Why would an extremely challenging and slippery trickster like Derrida be dumped onto Australian undergraduate Humanities and Social Science students? Given their High School training, they simply are nowhere near being able to deal with it.
I have friends who did English Honours in the 1980s and they say they The Bible was compulsory. Nowadays, they are more likely to take courses in Creative Writing or How Bad Whitey Really Is as Discoursed by a Transgendered Subaltern.
It reminds me of the way that public school gentlemen used to chuck in untranslated tags from Horace to show they had a good classical education.
Reminds you? How long ago did you move in these circles? Are you sure that was their motivation? What about those who “chuck in un/translated tags� from Pepes Le Pew? Or bang on about “The Other?�
j_p_z/Klaus K
Someone raised the question earlier on, of whether or not there was a good (and reasonably ‘objective’) example in music of the transcendent, qua transcendent, independent of pathos.
I reckon the King’s College Boy’s Choir in the Rolling Stones’ Can’t Always Get What You Want must come close! J But why the antipathy towards pathos? If only CultiStudies tutorials trilled with passionate debate over the influence on The New Testament of pathos in fifth century Athenian tragedy, particularly in light of Plato’s criticisms – Book X, The Republic – Aristotle’s thumbs up in Poetics and Nietzsche’s in The Birth of Tragedy. Even better, how Wagner’s early operas, Shakespeare’s Hamlet, and/or Mozart’s treatment of these issues might help us understand Princess Diana’s celluloid mythography. Diana as postmodern Antigone, per chance?
j_p_z
I’m working with what is primarily an aesthetic-philosophical (viz., mainly aesthetic, but derived from the philosophical) idea of the transcendent, but also perhaps an idiosyncratic one, as it also derives from my personal experiences with same; there’d be more to say on all this, but I’m trying to keep it brief.
Far from idiosyncratic. It is precisely this Einfuhlung that is at the centre of Bourdieu’s analysis of bourgeois HC as “elective distance from the necessities of the natural and social world.â€? Indeed Bordieu would see your rejection of the transcendent in favour of the philosophical and formalist as ‘taking the bourgeois denial of the social world to its limit.’ As you suggest, we could spend an eternity debating this, but I am going to stick to my original claim that transcendence is ultimately rooted in religion. Until recently, I thought I wanted to go into Neuroscience. The two areas I was obsessed with were memory loss and trying to identify neural pathways for religion. But I am sure this is an area you have thought about a thousand times more deeply and knowledgably than I have. But we can still have a cracking discussion even with that difference sin-binned for now.;)
Personally I think pathos, or other appeals to human feeling, is a perfectly useful tool for an artist working legitimately in these avenues (Hamlet, ‘Don Giovanni’ and indeed most of Mozart, Schubert and Wagner come to mind), but it’s useful to exclude these things here because they bring up issues of subjectivity and personal taste.
But then you also must ignore artistic intent and again, to use Bourdieu, the processes by which you, yourself, have been initiated into Hamlet and Mozart, which you can never hermetically seal from affect, no matter how hard you try.
I think further helpful criteria are to exclude the specifically verbal (e.g. opera), as well as work with a specific programmatic or subtextual purpose (say, religious music, triumphant music, or the explicitly lyrical).
These points are profound and are at the core of Nietzsche.
One thing that is a tad ironic, JG, is that you might “do well” to take some courses in avoiding hyperbole and being responsive to arguments when you try to refute them.
The comment that no one can understand Derrida without knowledge of “Attic Greek” is nonsense. And the Septaguint (but not “The Bible”) was written in Koine Greek. You’ve made similar arguments before and they’re still wrong. It may be better to read Derrida in French but you don’t need to be a polymath to understand him. Just intelligent.
It’s also quite wrong to say this:
In any case, I’m not discussing Derrida but rather asking a perfectly reasonable question about why it matters that politicians or citizens don’t have shared references from the Bible. In any case, the point of the quotation presumably refers to biblical allusions, not decades of study of Biblical hermeneutics or exegesis.
Your comments about philosophers would have more credibility if they demonstrated that you understood argument. Derrida was sometimes (wrongly) criticised for privileging rhetoric over logic. If that’s to be a postmodern luvvie, it seems to me that you stand self-accused.
I note your previous comment that to recite a list of qualifications and titles is an argument from authority and no reliable indicator of the strength of an argument, with which I (but not you, it seems) agree.
Have you read or seen Antigone? Where’s the parallel?
What influence?
For that matter, what’s the relevance of any of this to Diana? Just that there is pathos? Though I don’t know what’s meant by “Mozart’s treatment of these issues”. What issues? Issues raised by Plato? Which ones? Please cite or explain.
Okay, Huyssens is still trying to score cheap points with that phrase, and I contend that he has misread Barthes and misunderstands Barthes’ project. I would be happy to inform him – if I had consulted Huyssens’ article and decided you have quoted in context – that I disagree with his reading, were that it was a good use of my time.
I defy you to find somebody asserting this:
“these people should be taught more ’relevant’ things to their day to day lives, such as bus-tickets and the ethics of turkey-slapping. It will give them self-esteem.�
I have nothing at all against pathos, but I fail to see its necessary link to transcendence. In fact I think an appeal to feeling could just as much ‘immanentize’ as lead to transcendence (which may need a more explicit definition is this argument is to continue).
“if” not “is”
See my point about hyperbole.
Of course, JG’s comments are valuable in one way because the absurdity of the false dichotomy really does show through because it’s so exaggerated.
Ie – if the kiddies aren’t learning Plato, they must be learning how to wash plates.
“Is that so, David? It’s not the case in Queensland as I understand the Senior English”
In NSW, the highest level of Year 12 English is Extension 2, which takes up four units (or up to 40% of your total study in all subjects). You can get do all four units without doing a single canonical or pre-20th century.
What’s scarier is that you can also get a 3 year degree in English literature without doing any. You just pick the “hollywood or bust!” units.
I don’t buy the snobby distinction between high and low culture. However, some texts just require more brainsmarts than others. Shakespeare, Camus and Joyce pose complex reflexive questions, demand abstract reasoning, juggle concepts, play complex language games AND/OR require historical insight to an extent that Big Brother doesn’t. I’m deliberately using opposite extremes, but it makes heuristic sense as an explanation of a continuum (actually, that’s still a simplification: many continuums of multiple cognitive requirements).
Why do current reading lists have such a fixation with the present? We already have the cultural coding to understand most Western contemporary popular texts, at least on the basic level. But for texts from another historical period, we need to learn a whole new conceptual scheme. This is hard work, but it helps stretch the imagination and promotes a critical, reflexive attitude conscious of it’s own temporality.
BTW – Bourdieu found that tastes correlate with socio-economic positions, and that cultural production is wound up with power. However, he did NOT think all texts are equally good or challenging.
Well, that’s where I’m suspicious, as I indicated in my last comment.
I know nothing about the NSW curriculum, and thank you for for the info, but if students were doing Patrick White instead of, say, Thomas Hardy (who I read in Senior), why is it necessarily the case that the same brainstretching and consciousness of temporality doesn’t occur? Hardy’s texts are to put it bluntly more straightforward to read even though they’re older, and it actually doesn’t take a lot of historical acuity to understand them. In a way, I suspect Frank Hardy would be harder to read in this sense than rural novels – because his urban Australia really is stranger than the typical 19th century novel – which (and here’s the problem with the high/low distinction again) in any case we all have a template for reading derived from costume drama – cf. a lot of the recent debate about contemporary appreciation of Austen.
I also think, as usual, this comment over-estimates how far you actually can stretch a high school mind. I used to get the English prize every year (Oh noes! I sound like JG!) and I was well taught from what in the mid 80s was a pretty traditional curriculum. I don’t think I really understood anything much about motivations, mores, practices, et, in Elizabethan England until much later in life. I was translating Shakespeare into a modernist frame, if you like.
I think it would be an exceptional, really rare English teacher who could teach even bright students the way you’d like.
In any case, usually calls for teaching the canon are dehistoricising and decontextualising. There’s a big difference between Stephen Greenblatt’s Shakespeare and a formalist Shakespeare who speaks to eternal verities or “pathos” or whatever.
There seems to be some bug in the works that makes typing comments into very long comments threads very slow indeed. Since that’s the case, and since comments are still going strong on this post, it might be useful to continue them here.