Tag Archive for 'cultural politics'

The climate crisis, politics and our years of magical thinking

Published
by
Mark
3 months, 2 weeks ago
in Climate change, Culture, Politics, Science and Sociology
. 36 Comments

I’ve had a stab, in a guest post over at Overland, at looking at how the tendencies we’ve always had to succumbing to magical thinking make climate change a very difficult challenge for politics – particularly when we need to ground that politics culturally as well as rationally in a postmodern age where the narrative is all.

The post is partly informed by the insights of the French sociologist Bruno Latour on knowledge and, particularly, by his claim that ‘we have never been modern’. If he’s right, and I think he is, there is no public sphere of reason to which we can unproblematically appeal. Rather, we need to ground our arguments in a sensibility which bridges the culture/nature divide, and to recognise that the only possible response to climate crisis is political. That’s a challenge both for progressives, who seem in many instances to have forgotten cultural politics, and for those who believe that reason will triumph. That’s also a belief – and it’s one that will only come true if it’s fought for.

You can read the post here.

English language, partisan misuse thereof, etc.

Published
by
Mark
1 year, 2 months ago
in Blogging, Books, Writers & Writing, Culture, History, Howardia, Media and Politics
. 38 Comments

Years ago, I used to read Quadrant – incidentally before Robert Manne became editor, if I recall correctly. Back in the day, there was a sense that there was some sort of contest of ideas, and thus there was some purpose to reading, or at least casting a glance across a range of “little magazines”. I think that time ended a long while ago. Certainly, I stopped reading Quadrant over a decade ago, and I can’t say I feel there’s some huge gap in my life.

After all the brouhaha about the Katherine Wilson/Keith Windschuttle hoax dies down, I suspect the most lasting insight to be derived from all the kerfuffle is that Wilson’s target had already disappeared into a long twilight of irrelevance. For mine, John Quiggin’s point about the saga is among the most telling – Windschuttle’s own credibility on the issue which has been central to the recent stages of his career – Indigenous history – lies in tatters because of his own inability to substantiate the claims he made many years ago now with further research. The biggest hoax, Quiggin argues, is Windschuttle’s own contribution to “the history wars”.

After a number of folks actually had a look at what’s published on Quadrant’s website these days, it’s painfully obvious that there’s very little credibility there to be undermined. Egregious grammatical errors, bizarre rants with scant evidence of an elementary ability to construct a coherent argument, to be sure.

So the other motto we might draw from the hoax affair is that it’s drawn attention to the absence of both standards and relevance in most of what Quadrant has to offer. Continue reading ‘English language, partisan misuse thereof, etc.’

More on Nixonland; of cultural politics and culture wars

Published
by
Mark
1 year, 4 months ago
in Authoritarianism, Culture, Foreign Elections, History, Howardia and USA
. 35 Comments

In a previous post on expectations of whether an Obama win will reshape politics and end the culture wars, I briefly discussed Rick Perlstein’s Nixonland, which I read recently. The title, incidentally, comes from a passage in a speech by Adlai Stevenson in the 1956 Presidential election, when the Democrats played on Eisenhower’s recent heart attack to stir up fears of Nixon becoming President – convinced as they were that attacking the genial Ike himself would be in vain:

Our nation stands at the fork in the political road. In one direction lies a land of slander and scare; the land of sly innuendo, the poison pen, the anonymous phone call and hustling, pushing, shoving; the land of smash and grab and anything to win. This is Nixonland. America is something different.

Perlstein emphasises the dissonance between Stevenson’s claims to high minded political virtue and his own tactics:

The courtly type, he couldn’t campaign directly against a dying war hero; instead he ran against the man who might replace him. And he did it in a singularly uncourtly fashion. He wrote his friend John Kenneth Galbraith, the (courtly) Harvard economist, “I want you to write the speeches against Nixon. You have no tendency to be fair.” Galbraith acknowledged that as a “noble compliment.”

There isn’t much evidence that Stevenson’s “jeremiads” helped his cause much. His loss to Ike in 56 was comprehensive, and its dimensions were greater than those of his first defeat in 52.

In another excellent book on Nixon, in this case on his various images in the American cultural imagination, David Greenberg emphasises that liberal attacks on the Republican’s devilish character tended to backfire. Nixon’s Shadow highlights the genuineness of the identification between Nixon and many voters, and debunks the claims that such identification was nefariously produced by artifice. Artifice is one of the perennial political arts. Continue reading ‘More on Nixonland; of cultural politics and culture wars’