It would be interesting to study the role of the economics editor. In Australia, at least, those papers and media outlets which employ such a person appear to see the role as enforcing the BCA line on liberal economics, even if sometimes the actually existing BCA companies have their hands well and truly out for the largesse of the state. There’s a bit of a story about ideology here, and the neo-liberal whip gig only really works if one is not too partisan about it – so Paul Kelly’s portentous ponderings fit the bill exactly. At The Australian (and here, the broader tale is one of the trajectory of that paper overall), Michael Stutchbury has taken the commentary in a more openly pro-Coalition direction. Witness, as they say on the op/ed pages, his latest rather unfocused piece – decrying Labor governments (and social democrats, and Rudd advisor Andrew Charlton) for mixing politics with economics. Magically, of course, blatant political fixes by conservative administrations never seem to attract the same opprobrium. It’s as if the “reform test” constantly being applied to Kevin Rudd (despite what he himself has said about his own views on economics, and perhaps it were better had he been taken at his word) were one of complete purity in adherence to the gospel according to the Productivity Commission, or whoever represents the yardstick for this stuff at any particular point in time.
It would be possible to expose any number of non-sequiturs, rhetorical moves, sophistries, and general incoherence in Stutchbury’s article.
But there’s a broader point here.
We live, we’re told sometimes, in an age of story-telling. Continue reading ‘Of media narratives, truth and narratologies’
Australia Post, which has been one of the many distributors for the excellent series of orange Popular Penguins, last week decreed that three titles could not be sold through their outlets – Anais Nin’s Delta of Venus, Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, and Michel Foucault’s History of Sexuality Volume One.
Such books are apparently “inappropriate for a mainstream shop”, according to a spokesperson for Australia Post.
Jessica Au at Meanjin’s blog Spike has put her finger on what’s at stake:
Yet no matter what kind of spin you put on it, this is clearly regressive behaviour, which again harks back to the days when books were treated as smut rather than literature. Behind it are the assumptions that consumers are not capable of making intelligent decisions about their purchases, that children’s innocence is paramount and that anything related to sex must be p*rnographic and therefore improper. As a government-owned corporation, Australia Post has simply shown that it will panic at the smallest kick of dust and do anything to preserve a conservative brand image.
The Popular Penguins range has been a huge success in a climate when it is increasingly difficult to sell titles – they’re affordable, diverse and easily recognisable in their eye-catching (but not-even-remotely-explicit) orange and cream covers.
Strangely enough, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, which was banned in Australia until the 1960s, remained unscathed. Presumably Australia Post are okay with references to ‘f*cking’ and ‘c*nt’, but not so much a Foucauldian analysis of sexuality and repression.
Happy New Year 2009 image courtesy of zltgfx at flickr – reproduced under a creative commons licence.
There are quite a few cultural constants of New Year’s Eve – fireworks (and the illegal ones in my neck of the woods certainly woke me up with a bang at midnight), revelling, and resolutions, the topic of today’s post. I haven’t traced the origins of the custom, but it makes intuitive sense that the social rhythm of time would prompt reflection and introspection and a desire to make a new beginning at the most significant turning point of our secular calendar. Perhaps time off work also contributes. No doubt there’s an aspect of secularisation in this cultural moment – examination of conscience and a resolution for amending the self have been part of a huge constellation of mindsets and practices in the West for a very long time, as Michel Foucault taught us.
From a sociological point of view, Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s thoughts about freedom are interesting here. Merleau-Ponty pointed out that we adopt, and test against our surroundings, a set of dispositions and practices oriented towards the world – something similar to what Pierre Bourdieu subsequently dubbed a habitus. And that word’s not chosen lightly, because as over time we make certain choices, we shift the field for making subsequent choices – aware or unaware, we pursue a certain direction. We’re part of that lifeworld in which we choose, and can’t really stand apart from it. And over time, the “sedimentation” of those choices can narrow our sense of the possible. Probably one of the reasons why another stock cultural truism of the New Year is that resolutions are doomed to fail is that we over-estimate the degree to which individual will alone can reshape our behaviours and attitudes. Not surprising in a deeply individualist society (and some of that sense of the choosing self also harks back to the dissemination and transformation of the confessional urge).
Continue reading ‘2009: New year’s resolutions (the sociological edition!)’
Club Troppo’s Don Arthur and I started a correspondence by email about some of the issues I raised in my post the other day about neo-liberalism and thinktanks, and the very rapid Blairisation of the Rudd/Gillard agenda (which has certainly become even more evident in the interim with the latest instalment in the “education revolution” and the momentum that some liberal and libertarian bloggers are correct to assume is building up towards vouchers in all forms of education). I don’t want to try to represent Don’s side of the discussion, but I did want to talk about a few things that I put to him, and thank him for the very stimulating opportunity to clarify my thoughts.
One argument that’s often raised by liberals in denying that talk of neoliberalism makes sense is the claim that the state is still large as a percentage of GDP, that Howard did redistribution, and so on. That’s a point that Andrew Norton often makes, in claiming that there’s a degree of social democratic consensus still embodied in the governing practices of the Australian state. John Quiggin has made the same, or a very similar point, from a different political position. There’s some truth in this, but only some. No, Margaret Thatcher didn’t succeed in rolling back the state very far. But expecting her to is to make a false assumption – that the ideological objective only has meaning insofar as it achieves its ostensible aims. What she was actually doing was building up a stronger state in some areas to contain the damage from its withdrawal from some areas. You need a strong state to attack the weak, basically.
Continue reading ‘On the futility of arguing about Hayek, or what’s in a name?’
In the spheres and circles in which Planet Janet moves, it’s “defend the Enlightenment” week. At first, I thought this was just the latest volley in the denialist wars, but now that we know that Ayaan Hirsi Ali is in town, and her usual fanbois are overcome with their customary posture of uncritical worship, I suppose that explains part of it, even if “We are at war with terrorism!” no longer packs so much political punch as a slogan. Indeed, there might be a bit of an exercise in parsing exactly why – in “an enlightened spirit of inquiry” – Planet’s proclamation that -
There is no doubt the West is suffering from a dangerous moral disorientation. It is not clear that we value the very idea of the West any more.
- is such an incoherent notion. In part that would be because the bricks she’s used to construct her discourse (her word, not mine) now no longer fit together anywhere so neatly as they once did, because the mortar of her political obsessions has grown old and cracked. But I’m not particularly interested in doing that, so I’ll use her as a segue to a consideration of the latest shot in the “higher education wars” – an article today by Gavin Kitching entitled “Paralysed by Postmodernism”. Continue reading ‘The Enlightenment is in danger! (from its false friends)’
Of media narratives, truth and narratologies
It would be interesting to study the role of the economics editor. In Australia, at least, those papers and media outlets which employ such a person appear to see the role as enforcing the BCA line on liberal economics, even if sometimes the actually existing BCA companies have their hands well and truly out for the largesse of the state. There’s a bit of a story about ideology here, and the neo-liberal whip gig only really works if one is not too partisan about it – so Paul Kelly’s portentous ponderings fit the bill exactly. At The Australian (and here, the broader tale is one of the trajectory of that paper overall), Michael Stutchbury has taken the commentary in a more openly pro-Coalition direction. Witness, as they say on the op/ed pages, his latest rather unfocused piece – decrying Labor governments (and social democrats, and Rudd advisor Andrew Charlton) for mixing politics with economics. Magically, of course, blatant political fixes by conservative administrations never seem to attract the same opprobrium. It’s as if the “reform test” constantly being applied to Kevin Rudd (despite what he himself has said about his own views on economics, and perhaps it were better had he been taken at his word) were one of complete purity in adherence to the gospel according to the Productivity Commission, or whoever represents the yardstick for this stuff at any particular point in time.
It would be possible to expose any number of non-sequiturs, rhetorical moves, sophistries, and general incoherence in Stutchbury’s article.
But there’s a broader point here.
We live, we’re told sometimes, in an age of story-telling. Continue reading ‘Of media narratives, truth and narratologies’