March 16, 2005
man, i shouldn't read anyone else's blog.
Thanks so much for making me read this, zot. sure, it's a good looking site, but...
“I’m glad,” I told him, “that people like you and Bob Santamaria were around to fight against communism.”Now, i wouldn't mock this young man's love for his grandfather, and i empathise with his loss, but this comment is laughable for so many reasons.
And it's followed by:
A few months earlier we’d had another conversation, where I told him how I’d changed my mind about socialism, that I’d realised how its proponents didn’t tolerate dissent. He was so weakened by illness that our conversation couldn’t last long enough for me to tell him that it was also because I finally realised that government interference in economic matters was inconsistent with my uncompromising insistence on maximum personal freedom (provided that one’s actions do not infringe another’s right to self-determination). I didn’t get to tell him how a colleague’s argument that to achieve socialism (a thing this colleague desires) we would have to abolish individual subjectivity, fills me with horror.
Again, not to mock his obvious grief for his grandfather, or his love for this man. But hell, i am mocking his politics. And i'm certainly mocking his turn of phrase, his knowledge of cultural studies and 'knowledge' of film. In the stupidest blog entry ever he writes in a review of the film japanese story (which i didn't much care for either, but that's not really the point):
The rest of the film, which is about an encounter between an East Asian man and an Australian woman, has little to recommend it. My first grievance, which I commonly hold against Australian films, is that it indulges in a view of Australia that is dominated by the outback. Since the majority of our population lives in state capital cities and their suburbs, this prevents such films from accurately representing Australian life even as they use farms or ‘the red centre’ to visually signify their Australian-ness.
This imbecile is teaching at unimelb?
Check his IQ: top zillion percentile. Says so right there, under 'skills' in his resume. I want to marry this guy.
No wonder unimelb shat me. I have only this to say:
Australian films which do not feature the outback (that i can remember):
'Death in Brunswick'
'strictly ballroom'
'dark city'
'ghosts of the civil dead'
'children of the revolution'
i could go on and on and on... and i'd like to say to this misinformed fool: you need to get some australian cinema up you, cultural studies boy.
Posted by Dogpossum on March 16, 2005 01:53 PMwell, myst i'm not sure that i'm actually having trouble with ben's writing style - i actually quite like his writing. it's his ideological positioning i take issue with...the _content_ of his work.
unimelb's english dept (especially cultural studies unit) shat me because it was a bunch of middle class kids (or aspiring-to-middle class kids) talkin' up de cultural stuffs, without any sense of political or ideological self-reflexivity. it really sticks in my craw when you take into account cultural studies history - it's roots in marxism and social consciousness.
most of the cultural studies people i met in my 2 years at unimelb had done their undergrad degrees at unimelb, then moved on to do their pgrad work there as well. they were young, with no life experience beyond uni, and seemed to have a profound lack of empathy for the experiences of others.
my experiences with this group were characterised by their unwillingness to work for an accessible student body which took into account the demands of being a parent or carer, having to work, being a spouse, having disability issues, etc etc etc. it was utterly maddening. maddening!
they seemed incapable of empathy and their research interests implied that feminism and idenity politics were - for the most part - _so_ last millenium. and if they did express some sort of 'lefty' politics, it was almost entirely a matter of self-interest.
indicative of the age group and lives of those involved i guess.
this is not a phenonemon limited to unimelb. there's a book i've skimmed through a few times about exactly the political state of cultural studies that introduces a few of my criticisms of the field:
Ferguson, Marjorie, and Peter Golding, eds. Cultural Studies in Question. London: Sage, 1997.
it drives me nuts that people like ben, with his profound lack of ideological self-reflexivity is teaching undergrads cultural studies stuff. god DAMN, but what is the point of our research, of our work in universities, if not to contribute to making things better for everyone? i really do feel that our work SHOULD function as political projects. we should be thinking 'how might my work improve the lot of every person in my community, my culture?' and to be aware of issues of privelege and oppression and so on. and to godDAMN CARE.
it's the sort of thing that nancy fraser talks about in her article on 'pragmatic feminism' (i haven't got the reference on-hand i'm afraid, but it's in one of her books. probably the hard-to-get one): womens studies or feminist cultural studies that is not theory-for-theory's-sake, but theory and research with practical applications.
this is socialism for me. this is being a socialist feminist: an awareness of responsibility, where one of our motivating forces should be research for positive, constructive social change.
hell, i wasn't going to get into this. and i certainly haven't done the issue any good with my writing in as tired and trashed state as mine... hell.
Posted by: dogpossum at March 26, 2005 01:26 PMand in further proof that I have no brains, I realised the comments go from bottom up.
Sorry.
Posted by: myst at March 23, 2005 10:47 PM*amused* ben, you just posed not one, but TWO melbuni-esque essay questions (4000 words or more). your comments really hurt my walnut-sized brain. I tend to read these things late late at night when my walnut seems to turn into a pea...and you're posting comments that require serious thought. It's like throwing "What it the meaning of life" questions at me at 6 in the morning and not drunk.
I think that's what dogpossum is trying to say. (but couldn't get to the end of your rather verbose and academically structured post)
Posted by: myst at March 23, 2005 10:45 PMthanks for the kind words, laura.
hmmm. so you're responsible for katy's sexy new bag?
yes, i am a crafty bastard as well. obsessive compulsive r us: sewing, crafty bits, blogging, thesising, dancing. it's all in the details, baby.
re ben. can't say i remember him. i'm working on what i read on his blog. and i - as i've said before - utterly disagree with his politics.
and i found the bob santamaria comment hilarious. i mean, really. reds under the bed and all.
that'd be me. if i could fit my arse under there with all those boxes of shoes, fabric, buttons and scarves.
i am 100% pink.
to misquote my bio ( http://www.sweethotblue.com/cgi-bin/ib/ikonboard.cgi?s=d419b0961d4ec6107c08d4230809f41e;act=Profile;CODE=03;MID=100-1014947276 ) on swingtalk ( http://www.sweethotblue.com/cgi-bin/ib/ikonboard.cgi?s=e793e195381eb300a9e6c970a6f1bd44 ), this chick makes no bones about using the [internet] to subvert the social order.
:D ahahahahahahhahahahahha
ahahhahahahahahahhaahhahahaha
ahahhahahahah
ben, meet casper ( http://www.sweethotblue.com/cgi-bin/ib/ikonboard.cgi?s=018b3a15de12bc721077918021c0e2bf;act=Profile;CODE=03;MID=67-1065797700 ).
Posted by: dogpossum at March 18, 2005 01:25 PMoh, I feel stupid, I just realised i sort of know you from Craftster too - you're another Darn Cheap devo, yes?
Posted by: laura at March 17, 2005 04:21 PMhi dogpossum - I don't *think* we have met, which is dumb, because I'm a pretty sure we are pgradding at the same university (operating outof the same building, even) but I been lerving ya blog, from afar!
I just came in to say that I sympathise profoundly with the general thing of being irrited almost unto the point of death by things one reads on another person's blog
(although, and this is a BIG although, I don't agree with you about Ben whose blog I read from time to time & who I have met at a conference, though he probably don't remember it, and I thought his work seemed pretty well free of posturing)
and I also agree with you generally about the unfortunate way melbourne university people come across. My particular beef is that too many of them use six or seven theoryjargon words where two or three simple plain English words would accomplish the job.
Posted by: laura at March 17, 2005 04:13 PMit's a blog man. not coherent academic argument.
blog = long and boring. monologue not dialogue.
Hi, dogpossum. You may remember we've met in real life: I just wish I could remember your name.
Hell, never mind about my feelings (I'm serious here). Just get stuck in: the cut and thrust of argument is valuable. As you'll note from my post about my grandfather's death, our relationship was fraught. It's hard to say I loved him all the time, but I did respect him a great deal.
I do, however, have to object to your post's being mostly ad hominem attacks. Let's have some reasons for why you object. I have a few questions to ask:
Not that it's likely this would ever have happened, but do you think it would have been good if Australia had become a Stalinist dictatorship? If you think it would have been bad, isn't it reasonable to appreciate the efforts of those who tried to stop it happening?
What, specifically, do you object to about my politics, other than that you don't share it?
What, exactly, are you mocking about my turn of phrase and my knowledge of Cultural Studies? It's worth noting here that while I work in Cultural Studies, I don't have much invested in the discipline: my work fits better into the videogame studies corpus. I never took CS subjects in undergrad, and came across from Asian Studies because it seemed like CS was a good catch-all for non-literary textual analysis.
What grounds do you have for calling me a fool and an imbecile?
I'm not being defensive, I'm asking for clarification. I'd actually really like to have an on-blog discussion with you about some of the issues at stake here. If there are points where I'm objectively wrong, I'd like to discover them.
On the one point where you use evidence to back your objections, I concede defeat. As I responded to your comment on my blog, I've seen three of those movies (Ballroom, Dark City, Children) and liked all of them. I'm not a cinemaphile, and I don't position myself as one. I don't have much to say on cinema when teaching CS, or writing about videogames: I restrict myself to commenting on things I feel qualified to talk about. And I don't have any interest in becoming an expert on cinema: my reviews are personal responses informed by my knowledge of other subjects. Correct my ignorance as you see fit.
Finally, another thing I'm curious about is why you see me as an example of why Unimelb shat you. This isn't meant to be a personal attack, since I quite liked you when I met you in RL, but I see your post as an example of why unimelb shat me. Ad hominem attacks on non-leftists are par for the course there, especially in CS. That we each stand for what shat the other causes me to propose this theory: unimelb shits everyone (in CS, and to a lesser extent, in English), and it does so because our disciplinary culture (in CS and English) fosters personal rather than intellectual rivalries. Is this partly because we try to settle questions by taking political sides rather than arguing points?
Posted by: Ben Hourigan at March 17, 2005 12:01 PM