Eco-critique is concerned with changing things so as to live a more sustainable life. It was fringe dwelling cottage industry in academia for a couple of decades---until people started taking global warming seriously. Now it is centre stage and conference title such as Thinking Through Nature: Philosophy for an Endangered World do not seem so left of field anymore, since an ecological mode of thinking or perspective with its caring for place is increasingly becoming a part of everyday life.
The Australian Humanities Review has an eco-corner, the earlier focus on ‘wilderness’ in Australia is shifting towards a greater concern with urban and rural ecologies, and a deeper concern to render our inhabitation of the planet more ecologically sustainable as well as socially just. So we have an ecology section of the Centre for public Culture and Ideas.
The popular discourse about the humanities and criticism still remains dominated by modernist critical paradigms such as Leavisism and New Criticism that are underpinned by a throwback to a residual Arnoldianism. This is contested by critical theory, which has its roots in the new critical practices derived from Marxism, feminism, psychoanalysis, deconstruction, queer theory and postcolonialism, and which uses the strategies of defamiliarisation.
Literary liberals were among the main antagonists of critical theorists and so we had the culture wars of the last decade. Things seemed to have changed though. The heat about 'theory' has gone in academia, and some sort of shift in the cultural terrain has taken place. But what kind of shift? My gut feeling is that it has something to do with both the conservative attacks on both liberalism and contemporary critical theory, and literature becoming a minor art for marginalised groups to use as an arena for articulating political struggle--eg., Grunge literature. But I'm not clear how the fallout is working.
In his The clash of paradigms: Australian literary theory after liberalism in the Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature, (Vol 7, 2007) Mark Davies argues that:
contemporary Australian literary theory, like most varieties of contemporary critical theory, is losing whatever relevance it once had, not because ‘theory’ has lost intellectual force, but because the contexts in which it operated have radically changed. A ‘crisis in liberalism’ and the rise of neo-liberalism and the new conservatism... requires a reassessment of the project of critical theory.
Davies spells this out in a way that is akin to a critical aesthetics in that he argues that 'literature' is more than a “pile of old and aging books”, and more a cultural formation that has a powerful set of ideological effects that continue to produce meanings that have little to do with whether or not literary books are written or read. He identifies this cultural formation as:
post-war forms of criticism such as New Criticism and Leavisism [which] helped perpetuate a post-Romantic aesthetic turn in literary criticism that remains relevant in settler nations such as Australia. Such forms of criticism inaugurate a critical language, a class of intellectuals who speak that language, and an audience for that language that together work to delimit the terms of discussion even as Australian writers and critics engage with topical issues such as race politics. Even where political questions are broached, engagement has been at the level of the symbol and has tended to orient around individuated notions of “tolerance” and “inclusion” (coded assimilation), rather than approach questions of racialised social agency or cultural context.
At the same time, the dominant forms of public criticism, as spoken in newspaper book reviews, author interviews, prize-giving speeches, literary festival sessions, and so on, explicitly exclude alternative critical models, arguably because of their strong interrogation of the (white) conditions of public knowledge. Literary criticism as it exists in the popular critical consciousness, in short, continues to function as a veiled defence of colonialism and white nationalism.
The subject of William Skidelsky's Critical Condition in the February edition of Prospect is the decline of the significance of book reviews. The argument is that the literary world is changing due to the shifting power relations within the literary landscape. This has mean the decline in the ‘authority of critics’. Skidelsky, who is deputy editor of Prospect, says:
Creative writers may have some vestigial authority, but in the domain of opinion, the old hierarchies no longer hold sway. Bloggers, booksellers, prize judges, critics: nowadays all inhabit the same, frighteningly level playing field..
First, the declining prestige of book reviewing is linked to the increasing commercialisation of publishing and the resulting reordering of power relations within the book world... Moreover, it is increasingly not just retailers who possess a disproportionate sway over literary fortunes. In recent years, other players have become similarly influential. Most significant among these is the Richard and Judy book club, which, since being created four years ago, has achieved an extraordinary dominance over British publishing, on a par with Oprah's book club in the US.
The idea that all opinions are equal, of course, pre-dates the internet. But the internet has given it a kind of tangible impetus. After all, before the internet existed, a measure of inequality was built into publishing. All opinions clearly weren't equal, because while everybody could express a view on any matter, only those who were paid to do so could publish them, and thereby reach a wide audience. But blogging has removed this barrier. Now anyone can publish their opinion on any subject, and that opinion can (theoretically at least) be read by everybody. That time-honoured refuge of the unnoticed — self-publishing — has been reinvented as a vehicle of self-empowerment.
The third reason for the diminishing importance of book reviews: the declining authority of academic criticism and journalists increasingly dominate the literary review pages of newspapers—and since an increasing number of books are written by journalists. But if literary journalism is increasingly feeding off itself, then that is largely because academic criticism has withdrawn from the field. In the last two decades, English literature has both tangled itself up in arcane and inaccessible debates about theory and emasculated itself by allowing itself to become a handmaiden to other disciplines, through its embrace of historicism and cultural studies.
All reasonable. He then ties this into the threat to print journalism:
One of the most disquieting things about the downgrading of book reviews is that it is happening at a time when serious print journalism generally is under threat: from other media (especially television and the internet), from diminished advertising revenues, from the growing number of free newspapers and trash magazines on the market. The old financial model of newspapers is looking increasingly unsustainable, and this makes it inevitable that editors and proprietors will start questioning—if they haven't done already—the worth of book reviews. What is their purpose? What value do they add? Such matters have clearly already been chewed over in the US—with, for literary journalism, deleterious consequences. In the long term, then, the prognosis for the book review—at least in its traditional form—doesn't look good.
One thought that should console the upholders of print journalism is that while blogs make a great deal of fuss about being where the action is, they contain little decent criticism. It is rare to encounter good critical writing on the internet that didn't start life in print form. Lively literary websites—or online magazines with literary sections—do exist, especially in the US: Salon, Slate, the Literary Saloon. But blogging is best suited to instant reaction; it thus has an edge when it comes to disseminating gossip and news. Good criticism requires lengthy reflection and slow maturation. The blogosphere does not provide the optimal conditions for its flourishing.
In the end, though, the squabbles between literary journalists and bloggers miss the point. While both parties have cast themselves as adversaries in a pressing contemporary drama, they really are (or should be) allies in a more important battle—for literature itself, and its right to be taken seriously. The significance of this struggle makes the differences between them trivial. All those who care about how books are talked about need to be vigilant. Otherwise, before any of us quite realise it, one of the flames that lights our enjoyment of literature may be snuffed out.
In Kiley Gaffney's review of Branden Joseph's Random Order: Robert Rauschenberg and the Neo-Avant-Garde it is stated that the historical and interpretive importance of his work is that it is a significant instigator of a neo-avant-garde movement, far more consistent and serious than the curatorial and intellectual conception of a mere repetition of earlier avant-garde movements.
Joseph argues that Rauschenberg and Cage initiated a new avant-garde project, one that approached the idea of difference not in terms of negation but as a positive force. Claiming that Rauschenberg's work cannot be understood solely from the standpoint of the Frankfurt School--whose theories have dominated discussions of avant-garde and neo-avant-garde aesthetics--Joseph turns to the theoretical positions of Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Derrida. Rauschenberg's neo-avant-garde was not a simple repetition of earlier avant-garde movements, Joseph shows, but a series of practices that opposed the rise of postwar spectacle, commodification, and mass conformity.Gaffney says:
By rearticulating avant-garde elements into a firm set of artistic practices and tropes, Rauschenberg resisted and opposed the spectacle, commodification and mass conformity of postwar life. His pictorial deployment of everyday visual ephemera (a ‘style’ often most famously accredited to Warhol’s Pop cohort) juxtaposed with reproductions of elements of old master paintings are the most celebrated of these works, both critically and aesthetically. Rauschenberg’s ‘Combine’ artworks aimed for an illogical compositional structure, as opposed to collage’s traditional calculated juxtaposition, and complicated the search for creative meaning.
Ilana Snyder, the author of The Literacy Wars: Why teaching children to read and write is a battleground in Australia, has an op-ed in in the Canberra Times on the public debates around literacy. This literacy--it stands for the ability to use language in its written form----is not placed in the context of the way that computers, are destabilizing the authority of the printed word, or the way that digital technology taking us into a new world where the emphasis is on an awareness of other people and our expanded ability to contact them to discuss issues and get help.
Snyder says that debates in the media over different aspects of literacy education about the teaching of grammar, reading and the canon, about the place of popular culture in the curriculum and the role of testing, about the use of new technologies and the introduction of a national curriculum are not new. However, in recent years the debates have become so heated and emotional that to characterise them as the literacy wars captures their force and intensity. She adds:
In their attacks, the conservative critics have accused literacy teachers of lowering standards by using child-centred approaches that do not provide children with a strong foundation in literacy learning. They have sought to discredit a literacy curriculum they believe is afflicted by relativism, fragmentation and a fixation on contemporary social issues. They have poured scorn on the teaching profession and institutions of teacher education, accusing them of damaging traditional educational values. Their mission has been greater emphasis in schools on cultural literacy, the literature of the Western canon and traditional values.
In response, literacy teachers and educators have argued that we can't turn the clock back, nor should we want to. There have been enormous changes in the world of ideas since many of the critics went to school in the 1950s due to science, but also due to feminism, multiculturalism and social justice. These ideas cannot be ignored and giving attention to them in the literacy classroom does not mean that there is no place for the enduring values and traditions of the classics and Australia's cultural heritage.She observes that at the heart of these battles are competing definitions of literacy, and that this conflict around definitions contributes to the debate.
Traditionally literacy has been thought of as a cognitive ability. Being literate has been seen as a matter of cracking the alphabetic code, word formation skills, phonics, grammar and comprehension skills. By contrast, more contemporary views see literacy as a social practice that takes place in different settings not only the classroom, but also the workplace and the other locations of everyday life. Reading or writing always involves reading or writing something with understanding.The lack of a single, correct definition of literacy that would be universally accepted, helps explain the conflict between the conservatives who want to preserve valued traditions and the literacy teachers who are caught somewhere between the legacy of the past and the imperative to prepare children for the demands of the future.
Snyder is right here as the concept of literacy goes beyond simply being able to read; it has always meant the ability to read with meaning, to interpret texts and to understand the different perspectives and diverse meanings.
The 'demands of the future' takes us into digitial literacy and visual "literacy". The capacity to read images questioning whether literacy is the right word. Digital literacy' would be more than cracking the alphabetic code, word formation skills, phonics, grammar and comprehension skills that implies a Victorian model of schooling.The Internet requires the ability to access networked computer resources and use them because the Internet has grown from a scientist's tool to a worldwide publishing and research medium open to anyone with a computer and modem.
The Internet model diverges from the conservatives Victorian model of education in that it places greater responsibility in the hands of the individual. Rather than being spectators - information consumers - we become Internet users, people who discover and evaluate content before deciding how to put it to work.(i.e. we're content creators). Content on the Internet is not a static thing. Instead, it is fully interactive, and it requires that we understand it as a combination of all the traditional forms of media, and several other forms that change the way we seek out information.
Secondly, personal publishing means that there is no peer review, no filtering, etc. Therefore we have a need for critical skills perhaps not taught explicitly previously. It requires a set of core competencies dependent on critical thinking. The most essential of these is the ability to make informed judgments about what we find on-line,to assemble diverse knowledges from different media and idea caches
In the foundation lecture at the Royal Courts of Justice Dr. Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, argued for the possible use of sharia law in the UK to resolve some civil matters as a way of engaging with the world of Islamic law on something other than an all or nothing basis. Williams' main argument was about ensuring the tolerance of the civil law towards religious concerns.
In the process of the lecture Williams commented on post-enlightenment philosophy. He says:
The great protest of the Enlightenment was against authority that appealed only to tradition and refused to justify itself by other criteria – by open reasoned argument or by standards of successful provision of goods and liberties for the greatest number. Its claim to override traditional forms of governance and custom by looking towards a universal tribunal was entirely intelligible against the background of despotism and uncritical inherited privilege which prevailed in so much of early modern Europe. The most positive aspect of this moment in our cultural history was its focus on equal levels of accountability for all and equal levels of access for all to legal process. In this respect, it was in fact largely the foregrounding and confirming of what was already encoded in longstanding legal tradition, Roman and mediaeval, which had consistently affirmed the universality and primacy of law (even over the person of the monarch).
His reason is this:
Societies that are in fact ethnically, culturally and religiously diverse are societies in which identity is formed, as we have noted by different modes and contexts of belonging, 'multiple affiliation'. The danger is in acting as if the authority that managed the abstract level of equal citizenship represented a sovereign order which then allowed other levels to exist. But if the reality of society is plural – as many political theorists have pointed out – this is a damagingly inadequate account of common life, in which certain kinds of affiliation are marginalised or privatised to the extent that what is produced is a ghettoised pattern of social life, in which particular sorts of interest and of reasoning are tolerated as private matters but never granted legitimacy in public as part of a continuing debate about shared goods and priorities.
Mel Gregg's description of her response to a night out with friends is a good example of the academic experience of the otherwise mundane. Surely a move and a Chinese meal don't trigger this kind of contemplation and confusion in "normal" people? Or maybe non-scholars do have similar experiences but are just too polite to talk about them?
Gregg says:
"I’m still feeling unhinged by the whole thing.But it did help me appreciate the complicated, chaotic, compromised world we live in, and how regularly it seems to involve being constantly buffetted by the most incongruent trivia just to make sure we don’t ever remain completely comfortable in our response to something. This lack of certainty and my resignation to it feels closely tied to what I understand by ‘having a scholarly temperament’, even though I also lament the way it prevents me from accessing many familiar kinds of mundane reassurance."
This resonates. Contrary to the popular notion of ivory tower academics enjoying a privileged position in some cocooned Neverland, the ordinary can be painfully confusing. You can't escape into the latest issue of Womans Day or enjoy the spectacle of Britney Spears' meltdown without complicating the whole thing, or reflecting on your own role in perpetuating damage.
The scholarly temperament is not the sole preserve of the credentialed of course, and I'm grateful for the analytical toolkit that makes "incongruent trivia" a solvable puzzle rather than the source of frustration it used to be. The mundane was never reassuring, but at least now I don't feel the need to acquire brain damage to fit in.
Loss of access to academia is the worst thing about the possibility that I'll end up working at Target. I'd rather give up a limb than my library card. So this from dana boyd is welcome. As Catharine Lumby said, the barbarians are no longer at the gate - they're inside the castle redecorating.
boyd has decided to boycott the academic lock down and publish only in open access journals. She calls on others to do the same, which is fine by me.
For those who talk about literacy---the ability to use language in its written form---- assume that visualisation is an unproblematic kind of 'translation' from one semiotic mode into another - as a simplistic kind of translation from one language to another. From a text based one to a visual one. The context here the way school and the university in Western societies, says that writing is serious and most highly valued; whereas visuality (ie visual art) is for the aesthetic development of the individual, as is music. This kind of structure has shaped not only the representational landscape, but also the cognitive and affective potentials of individuals.
In the digital visual media world we are finding ourselves doing things differently. Whereas the old-fashioned book was read from beginning to end, the archive of digital images is used as well as interpreted. The shift here is from an older organisation of text to a newer organisation of resource; from an older concern with knowledge, to a newer concern with gathering information to manage a task demanded by, or set, in a unit of work.
So the semiotic landscape that we inhabit is changing. The Web is fundamentally a window into the concerns and narratives of popular culture. If we factor in the role that computer and online games have in defining a cultural orientation, then there is a need to develop creative tools to critique visual cultures, and this needs to become more central to the task of teaching and learning.
Stephen Muecke, in a talk given to the Cultural Studies Association of Australasia's annual conference in Adelaide in December----Sustaining Culture puts his finger on my unease with cultural studies. The text is published online in The Australian.
My unease is the way cultural studies understands nature, presupposes the nature/human divide, and understands nature. Muecke says:
Unfortunately for cultural studies, it seems stuck with the human scale of things. It is the inheritor of the western European modernist view that the world is divided between the natural world on one side (accessible only to hard science) and the cultural world on the other (full of imperfect perceptions and values). So because cultural studies is intrigued merely by human variety and power struggles identified as human (as opposed to struggles against rising sea levels, accumulating waste, rat plagues or Muzak in supermarkets), it has abandoned nature to the scientists.
So the critical theorist sits cornered in the modern apartment of culture, grumbling about dominant discourses and the construction of reality, looking for cultural margins to celebrate, having conceded that the techno-capitalist machine has either destroyed everything else or it is about to. But you are only in this depressing trap if you accept that modernism is the only Enlightenment cutting edge, progressively separating us from ancient superstitions and pre-modern cultures, which are supposedly closer to nature. But natural things and wholesome primitive cultures are not being left behind, and there was never any purity about such things anyway. There are only natural-cultural hybrids.
What then of nature? It is only seen within culture. Nature, its processes, assemblages and things, has been gobbled up by society and culture. Muecke doesn't really explore this other than pointing the way beyond cultural studies as a ‘post-literary’ discourse premised on the natural science/humanities divide. (I'm not sure where the social sciences fit in). Muecke is optimistic:
So how will cultural studies change once it admits [natural] things and non-humans into co-existence and dignified consideration? Ignoring science-humanities divisions, you may want to describe the interplay of real things in a situation. Seb's allergy is a problem of growing levels of pollutants, the role of medicines and the medical industry, the technological aspects of bedrooms and contemporary housing, including cleaning; the physiology of human respiratory tracts; the bio-chemical analysis of the key protein chitin in dust mites, and finally the culture of dust mite behaviour.
In his Introduction to From a Cause to a Style: Modernist Architecture's Encounter with the American City Nathan Glazer says that Modernism was not simply a new style in architecture, succeeding neo-Gothicism, neoclassicism, Art Nouveau. Modernism was a movement, with much larger intentions than replacing the decorated tops of buildings with flat roofs, molded window frames with flat strips of metal, curves and curlicues with straight lines. It represented a rebellion against historicism, ornament, overblown form, pandering to the great and rich and newly rich as against serving the needs of a society's common people.
Glazer than adds:
Something odd and unexpected seems to have happened to modernism in architecture and planning: it had broken free from its origins and moorings, drifted away from the world of everyday life, which it had hoped to improve, into a world of its own. From a cause that intended to remake the world, it had become a style, or a family of styles. Modernism had, it is true, produced masterpieces, but it had been incapable of matching the complex urbanity that the history of building, despite its attachment to the historical styles decried by modernism, had been able to create in so many cities. As the older parts of cities were swept away in a wave of urban renewal, as nineteenth-century courthouses and city halls were demolished for modern replacements, more and more people wondered whether what they had lost was matched by the new world being created by modernism.
As Glazer notes the real opposition to the modernist housing project has come not from critics but from the very people that the projects were designed to serve. To the surprise of the enlightened urban planners, people have resisted the attempt to demolish their streets and to sweep away the familiar, the domesticated houses and the small backyards in the inner city. They don’t like living in the air: nor do they like to stand at a window and stare at nothing. They want the life of the street; they want to feel life around them and at the same time to know that they can shut it out and let it in at will.
Cities, unless held together by their ancient fabric of streets and quarters like the cities of Italy and France, or compressed by the kind of centripetal excitement as in a New York and San Francisco, become increasingly alien to those who inhabit them. People then flee them in droves. And yet cities are the nub of social and creative life, and if we flee from them it is into a sterile solitude of suburbia based around the car.
The modernists often did not build for the city, but against it. Thus Le Corbusier’s plan for Algiers first suggested that the old Muslim cities could be entirely refashioned in total disregard of the religious and social needs of the people. Le Corbusier addressed the “problem” of packing people into a city while allowing free movement across it, and his solution was to put highways in the air, with the people placed into apartment blocks beneath them. Ancient homes and corridor streets were to be demolished, and huge tower blocks were to front the ocean, dwarfing mosques and churches.
For modernists architecture is an artform that must be led by its own avant-garde with its utopian tradition. What is delivered in making the city anew is a boring array of unsightly towers around a empty or lifeless open space—the old Bauhaus design is endlessly recycled----and this has been coupled to the strong processes of neoliberalism that have transformed the world we live in.
A 20th century academic narrative held that there are definite cultural differences between the humanities and nature because the two offer different forms of knowledge. In the humanities, a big part of the mission is to preserve, transmit and interpret the inherited cultural archive. In the sciences the job is to make new discoveries about how nature works. This duality of two cultures was premised on a print culture and its sensory modes.
This has been undercut by the newly forming world of the digitalized humanities with its online archives, electronic communication, online journals, new forms of scholarship as well as new forms of publishing. Instead of going to the library I can access material from anywhere, and then learn how to interpret the value of what I find online.
So how do we interpret these changes? One way was briefly explored in this post on Kevin Robins article, ' will image move us still'?, in The Photographic Image in Digital Culture (edited) by Martin Lister and the debate on post-photography with its concern with the ‘digital revolution’ and how it is transforming epistemological paradigms and models of vision.
The new information format is understood in terms of the emancipation of the image from its empirical limitations and sentimental associations; it is a matter, that is to say, of purifying the image of what are considered to be its residual realist (positivist?) and humanist interests.
The blurb for Vectors: Journal of Culture and Technology in a Dynamic Vernacular says that 'it maps the multiple contours of daily life in an unevenly digital era, crystallizing around themes that highlight the social, political, and cultural stakes of our increasingly technologically-mediated existence.' The Perception issue explores the way that digital media model multiple perspectives in ways that push beyond the sensory modes supported by print. I'm not even sure what the sensory modes supported by print are.
Anne Friedberg's The Virtual Window: From Alberti to Microsoft may help as it is concerned with how the world is framed as well as what is in the frame. The book's blurb says:
In The Virtual Window, Anne Friedberg examines the window as metaphor, as architectural component, and as an opening to the dematerialized reality we see on the screen.In De pictura (1435), Leon Battista Alberti famously instructed painters to consider the frame of the painting as an open window. Taking Alberti's metaphor as her starting point, Friedberg tracks shifts in the perspectival paradigm as she gives us histories of the architectural window, developments in glass and transparency, and the emerging apparatuses of photography, cinema, television, and digital imaging. Single-point perspective--Alberti's metaphorical window--has long been challenged by modern painting, modern architecture, and moving-image technologies. And yet, notes Friedberg, for most of the twentieth century the dominant form of the moving image was a single image in a single frame. The fractured modernism exemplified by cubist painting, for example, remained largely confined to experimental, avant-garde work. On the computer screen, however, where multiple "windows" coexist and overlap, perspective may have met its end.