School of Culture and Communication - Research Publications

Permanent URI for this collection

Search Results

Now showing 1 - 3 of 3
  • Item
    Thumbnail Image
    Literature, culture, mirrors
    FROW, JOHN ( 1997)
    John Frow responds to Simon During Simon During proposes – as I read it – six sets of reasons for the shift within departments of English from traditional literary studies towards cultural studies. The first is the academic appropriation of a tradition of Romantic anti-academicism stretching from Wordsworth to Dada. The second is a new mode of subject formation by which students are trained as consumers of cultural goods. The third is the valorization of social identities perceived as marginal within a traditional academic framework. The fourth is the development of new regimes of student choice, reflected in changed patterns of enrolment. The fifth is the emergence of a policy framework designed to enhance national economic competitiveness. The sixth is a regime of training which prepares students for jobs in the cultural sector.
  • Item
    Thumbnail Image
    Australian cultural studies: theory, story, history
    FROW, JOHN ( 2005)
    In a forthcoming paper on the History of Theory Ian Hunter calls for a space for historical reflection on the so-called ‘moment of theory’, and goes on to describe his argument as being indicative of ‘a particular way of undertaking intellectual history’. Let me posit, perhaps against the grain of Ian’s intentions, that ‘historical reflection’ and ‘intellectual history’ constitute distinct sub-sets of the history of philosophy. Historical reflection, which is central to the Hegelian critique of the self-becoming of philosophy, is excluded from contemporary analytic philosophy by its rigorous refusal of historical time as the condition or context of thought. Intellectual history is what is then left over when the history of philosophy is disconnected from the space in which philosophy actually happens, and in that sense is quite different from the historical reflection in which a past is connected, with whatever discontinuities and complexities, to the present that reflects on it. Intellectual history is histoire; historical reflection is discours.
  • Item
    Thumbnail Image
    Cultural studies and the neoliberal imagination
    FROW, JOHN ( 1999)
    What remains of the liberal vision of a common public culture in a world of asserted differences? What mechanisms of consenting or dissenting identification sustain a democratic public sphere when politics becomes spectacular? And isn’t the representation of publicness always the performance of a division, an exclusion, a minoritization? In order to put the issues that I think are at stake in these questions as pointedly as I can, let me take as a brief example the rhetoric deployed in Australia at the moment by a politician called Pauline Hanson. Hanson is a right-wing populist in the mould of Le Pen, appealing to a broad working-class and rural constituency who have been damaged, and feel damaged, by the downsizing effects of globalization, by the decline of the rural sector, and by what they perceive to be favorable treatment given to indigenous and immigrant Australians. Her politics of grievance is expressed most economically in two statements: “All Australians should be equal,” and “All Australians should speak English.” The first of these statements means: “Indigenous people should not claim a separate cultural identity, nor the separate forms of political and economic recognition that might flow from it.” The second (which has its American counterparts in, for example, the Californian legislation deeming English to be the sole language of official business) means: “Asian migrants are not welcome in this country because they steal jobs from white people.” These are demands for cultural commonality and for shared civic values; they are at once perfectly reasonable and deeply racist. Note, however, that their illiberal force is expressed in the language of Enlightenment civility: the principles of the equality of citizens, of resistance to privilege, of the rule of law, of civic responsibility. To make this point is not to condemn that language but to say that its uses are always strategic, positional, overdetermined by the secondary codes that translate it for particular knowing audiences.