Reports From The Paris Commune

La Commune

The joke isn't funny anymore

After what has just happened at the University of Alabama at Huntsville, I cast my mind back to the distinction drawn in Will Teach for Food: PhD can mean two things: Poor Hungry Desperate, or Privileged Histrionic Demanding. Of course, nothing can excuse such an extreme form of protest, and I feel so sorry for the victims....

A Secret Country

Not since 2007 have I talked about John Pilger in relation to what I disparagingly referred to as "cultural journalism". I was recently reminded of how much work remains to be done when I noticed my review of his book about Australia, A Secret Country, was subject to a reprimand. According to this respondent, trying to import theory into journalism, or measure the latter against the former, is the hobby of "stiff necked bores out of touch with the practical realities" of life. You see, the argument continues, a reliance on anecdotal evidence can be justified over any systematic, empirical analysis, on the basis that journalists are trained to go and "talk to the people themselves". I posted a reply, and I am putting it up here because I think it also speaks to the other side of the issues I raised in "Britney Is Cheaper": i.e. my interlocutor is arguing that theoretical mediation does not need to be acknowledged.

My own position is to consider the tradeoffs between what sociologists call "middle range theory", and immanent critique. This gives me some direction on how to avoid the extremes of theoretical abstraction and simplistic empiricism. It's not something I expect journalists to do in their everyday work, which is tightly controlled by deadlines. It's surely not unreasonable though to expect something a bit more ambitious when a journalist is contracted to write a book. Try comparing the repetitive "Pilgerisms" in his books with the flair of someone like a Christopher Hitchens (who is at least provocative and a thinker, even when his opinions are wrong), and you will start to picture the latter running rings around the former.

As for the theorists I took issue with in that earlier post, they are lacking, in my estimate, to the extent that they do not acknowledge how, for critical theorists to be worthy of the name, democracy has to go "all the way down". This implies it becomes your responsibility to apply these critical tools to your own practices. That's also the reason that I post a link to the full text of Minima Moralia on the blogroll, and recommend reading Weber's Science as a Vocation:

Hence academic life is a mad hazard. If the young scholar asks for my advice with regard to habilitation, the responsibility of encouraging him can hardly be borne....Do you in all conscience believe that you can stand seeing mediocrity after mediocrity, year after year, climb beyond you, without becoming embittered and without coming to grief? Naturally, one always receives the answer: 'Of course, I live only for my "calling."' Yet, I have found that only a few persons could endure this situation without coming to grief. This much I deem necessary to say about the external conditions of the academic man's vocation. But I believe that actually you wish to hear of something else, namely, of the inward calling for science.

Wonderful stuff. However, I'm motivated by more than a desire to avoid reliance on proleptic reasoning. Making democracy go "all the way down" necessitates slaughtering a few sacred cows along the way. Speaking then as an Australian, my critique of Pilger is aimed at the reigning patriarch of investigative journalism, just as Crawford dissects Nick Cave as the "reigning patriarch of Australian popular music". There is simply better material out there, so I make a point of citing it in my response:

You have not responded to the terms of my review, letalone offered any examples to back up your claims about academic theories that are out of touch with the reality of Australian life. This makes it impossible to assess whether your diagnosis is correct, or even what it would mean for you to be correct. To put it mildly, that is somewhat disingenuous, and perhaps even misleading.

In contrast, I haven't mislead anyone. You give me one citation of an objective secondary source by Pilger, and I'll give you a multitude of his anecdotal evidence in reply. The ratio is clearly disproportionate, so I'm sticking with my original characterisation. Besides, going to speak to the people themselves, as you put it, is hardly the exclusive preserve of journalists: there is a reason the "social sciences" are named as such (i.e. the basis of ethnography). When I speak about anecdotes, this has more to do with Pilger's habit of inserting himself into the narrative as the basis of authority, which would be fine, were it reflexive enough to acknowledge the interpretation is mediated by theoretical frameworks. Hence, I don't say there is no space for journalists, but just question how and why they are so often able to dominate public discussions of social issues. It is a classic tactic of journalists to say they are just getting at the facts, so their practices need never be examined: but surely no democracy worth its salt can afford to shield the Fourth Estate by not holding it to account, right? Democracy has to go "all the way down". I don't trust in an author's personal integrity, until it is reinscribed in larger frameworks of meaning. This is the "practical reality" you appear oblivious to: we need theory so we can have a set of prospective ideals to work towards, as reality/practice can sometimes fall short of our required standards. Those who don't understand this point won't be able to appreciate why someone like Jurgen Habermas is both an academic and a public intellectual, who writes newspaper columns and contributes to various popular periodicals.

So I'm more optimistic about the possibility of straddling the divide you attempt to police between the academy and the popular press. Indeed, many Australian scholars have in effect done the same thing as this German thinker, by choosing to reason in public. Think of authors such as Humphrey McQueen, Manning Clark, Anne Summers and Donald Horne (The Lucky Country was a bestseller in Australia). And then there's the fact that sociologist Michael Pusey's term "economic rationalism" (which is conceptually inspired by Habermas), has entered into the everyday Australian lexicon. This suggests to me that the public is mature, they can decide for themselves- they don't need to be chaperoned like children by John Pilger on the assumption that theory and facts are too difficult to read in combination, in the manner which you prescribe.

Further to this point, you may have noticed that I'm also interested in the process of globalisation, which requires plenty of facts to benchmark how un-even development is and what causes it, if there is to be any chance of formulating a constructive response. Consider, for example, Pilger's failure to contextualise Australian industrial democracy in such relative terms. He discusses Prime Minister Hawke's government with reference only to the transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich. But in so doing, he downplays the significant role played by The Accord in moderating the excesses of economic reform. This point could have been clarified in a global context, by contrasting the Australian experience with, say, Britain's Thatcherite Revolution from around the same period, or New Zealand's disastrous experiment with "Rogernomics". While hardly perfect by any means, Australia served as a sanctuary for the waves of economic migrants from these countries, who were fleeing draconian policies that didn't offer much in the way of safety nets for workers. More recently, it was Prime Minister John Howard who attempted to break the historic compromise, with his introduction of the so-called "Work Choices" [sic] legislation, but thankfully, this proved the unmaking of his government.

In other words, Pilger simply fails to convey any sense of the value of The Accord as a bulwark against the rise of neoliberalism. He instead confines his discussion [sic] of Australia's democratic achievements to one paragraph at the beginning of the book, with reference only to events way back in the historical record, such as the invention of the secret ballot. Therefore it is Pilger who can fittingly be described as "somewhat misleading"- not me.

If you had taken the time then to read the titles I cited before posting your response, you would have found an enormous amount of empirical evidence, (including statistics, in How Australia Compares), to contextualise the claims of the respective authors. Moreover, the arguments are presented in a very accessible fashion and have thus not alienated the non-academic reader; witness their ready availability in popular bookstores and public libraries in my country, as well as the willingness of some journalists to draw on them as source material. I applaud THOSE journalists, because here we have a clear realisation of Habermas' ideal of "the public sphere", in which academia and journalism alike become more democratic, relevant, and accurate. Pilger's self-legislating approach is clearly limited in comparison.

In any case, I should also mention that Pilger's book is rather old now, so his empirical work, such as it is, could benefit from some updating if it is to continue to inform discussion of contemporary Australian social issues.

Only one of the following people....

...has/had a mind, ethics, and talent. Can you guess who I'm talking about?












Eric Harris & Dylan Klebold : Hitmen For Hire 1998
Uploaded by xuti75. - Exotic and entertaining travel videos.

Political Geographies of Mars: A History of Martian Management

An encouraging quote from Christy Collis's article about satellites and GEO (Geostationary Earth Orbit):

"My experience as a Space cultural theorist demonstrates that this experience of the lack of understanding of the centrality of space at times leads to condemnation of Space scholarship: when people are starving on Earth, I've been scolded, how can you morally justify sitting around thinking about Outer Space...Yet, Space is imbricated into our lives, our social organization, our cultures, and the power politics of the world."

She certainly makes a convincing case, noting how military usage of these networks amounts to around 40%. Of course, these public voices/private interests, encompass a lot more than that:


I'm also impressed by how Collis extends her conception of Space in ways that could complement the radical imagination of Kim Stanley Robinson. This is the abstract of an article she co-authored with Phil Graham, which appeared in Management and Organization Theory (4, 3, 2009, pp 247-261):

"The task of this article is to provide an analysis of the uneven terrain of Martian political geographies in the context of western political economic trajectories. Focusing on debates over the nature of Mars’s legal status, the article attends to a key question, a question that has not yet been answered: should Mars be a terra communis — the common property of humanity, unavailable as private property — a terra nullius — or space available for private property claims — or a ‘cosmic park’ space of intrinsic value? That is, should Mars be claimable space, and if so, how could it be transformed into a possession, and by whom? By outlining arguments both for and against the idea of Mars as available for claiming and colonization, the article demonstrates that when it comes to Mars, the historical processes of imperial and capitalist management and organization of ‘new’ spaces are not the only options available for humans’ relationships with Mars".

Britney is cheaper.....

Seeing this clip inspired me to dig around for some media sociology. You probably won't find anything comparable in the blogosphere though, where Kittler, McLuhan, Baudrillard, Zizek et al are the order of the day. An excellent critical response to the Canadian media theorists, McLuhan, Innis, can be found in Alan O'Connor's book on Raymond Williams, but I can't pass up this article. Here is another good overview of the contemporary relevance of Williams to television studies. I ordered a whole swag of books yesterday, including McGuigan's Cool Capitalism, so fortunately the aforementioned theoretical prejudices have been unable to completely dictate the terms of what publishers are willing to produce.

What I'm pointing to here, of course, is the publishing trend I've discussed before on this blog. I could have just as easily written that "Continental philosophy is cheaper", or Zizek is cheaper, or "Baudrillard is cheaper". The analogy holds in so far as the crisis in scholarly publishing has pushed more towards the production of textbooks or recondite, philosophically oriented cultural analysis, operating at a level of abstract generality where they are less likely to alienate readership outside of their original context of production by being too specific. An added bonus, from a publisher's point of view, is that production is both cheaper and faster, and hence more adaptable to market fluctuations, as it is not detained too much by painstaking empirical considerations. The irony therefore is that the theorists in question are prone to reading "abstraction" at face value as the dominant feature of contemporary capitalism, but don't seem prepared to countenance the fact that their networks are the beneficiaries of what they claim to deplore. So there's some compelling reasons why reflexive disclosure must be avoided by some bloggers! This common pitfall makes me more appreciative when I come across someone like kvond who can think reflexively.

Luckily I am also able to find solace with authors such as Bryan S Turner and Chris Rojek, who have attempted to mobilise sociology against the style of analysis I've been describing, which they refer to as the decorative turn. One of its chief characteristics is the penchant for oracular pronouncements, with the theorist descending upon the readership, like a god from a machine. Take Zardoz for example, who has nailed Zizek's style perfectly:

Now before anyone gets too judgemental about the justifications for this critique, it is advisable to first thoroughly study Turner and Rojek to understand the alternative they are substituting. They are offering more than the relativism associated with strong social constructionism, in their turn to "the social". But I still appreciate how social constructionism can act as a way station for later arrival at a more epistemologically robust position.

I can actually date my awareness of social constructionism to when I was about 12 years old. I was at home watching the "Punky Business" episode of The Goodies comedy series. I didn't know much about punk at the time, but I still sensed that most of the satire was hopelessly out of touch with why people wanted to become involved in such an exciting scene. The part though that did catch my attention was the program's scepticism about some of the music journalists who attached themselves to punk. The basic idea that some people were really making the news, and not just reporting [sic] it, brought home to me the opportunism that can be a feature of any scenius. To this very day, I chuckle at the memory of the satire of Caroline Coon in the form of a character called Caroline Kook (wonderfully played by Jane Asher). Kook cynically observes that the music press faces the imperative to always have a new scene to hype, or they would lose their market appeal to inform the otherwise clueless about what was hip. This can amount to much ado about nothing, which I was reminded of many times when reading Melody Maker and New Musical Express throughout the course of the 1980s (I found the Manchester scene after Joy Division, for example, boring beyond belief).

The point of this anecdote is that the novelty of change is commonly exaggerated. I say this in part because it concurs with Turner and Rojek's reference to Kierkegaard's words from 1846 to summarise the limitations of certain forms of contemporary theory. The Present Age describes a faux revolutionary age which purports to be addressing action, but which:

"transforms that expression of strength into a feat of dialectics: it leaves everything standing but cunningly empties it of significance. Instead of culminating in a rebellion it reduces the inward reality of all relationships to a reflective tension which leaves everything standing but makes life as a whole ambiguous: so that everything continues to exist factually whilst by a dialectical deceit..it supplies a secret interpretation that it does not exist" (p. 42-3).