Quick Shots - 20/Jan/2015

I'm (Most Definitely Not) With Stupid

I figure I'm inadvertently coming back a lot to the book by Bernard Keane and Helen Razer, simply because it's causing bit of a stir in the media where it was lobbed as a bomb. It's a breezy read that does a philosophical survey of notions that have contributed to our gridlock of ideological positions and presentations of bogus cultural arguments. Mostly - I would have to say with a bit of a smirk - it reads exactly like the tome written by University of Sydney alumni. To that end, Jason Wilson at the guardian had this bit to say this week:

She thinks that feminism has lost its proper (narrow) focus — “the masculine matter of violence and the feminine matter of poverty” — and has fallen prey to the stupid idea that it “can be advanced through accounts of … lived experience”. She argues that the “safe spaces” of feminist and queer activism are now rigid zones of speech-and-thought policing. Postmodern relativism (Derrida’s fault!) has led us to thinking that what’s on television has political significance.  

In my observation, queer and feminist activists do a lot more than swap stories and watch TV, and in any case, Razer relies on an evaluative distinction between “real” and “symbolic” activism that seems inadequate in an age of information economies and mediated politics. Her depiction looks suspiciously like the straw-man we find in the work of other soi-disant lefties with largely reactionary audiences, like Brendan O’Neill and the rest of the “Living Marxism” crew. It’s not helped by the fact that much of Razer’s account is developed on the basis of things that happened in the 1990s.

This is a period she seems obsessed by, mining it for cultural references, intellectual controversies, and above all, anecdotes. For someone who disputes the value of personal stories, her intellectual case rests a lot on her own biographical experiences, especially those she had at the University of Sydney in the early part of that decade. Indeed, both authors were there at the same time. One is struck again by how much of Australian political debate is framed by (and constrained by) grudges and opinions acquired in Camperdown decades ago.

Otherwise, Wilson's column is a complaint that the book is mean towards lesser voices in the media scrum and is somewhat elitist. I'm no reactionary, but I figure I may as well state my disagreement here.

I happen to think Razer's issue with identity politics is actually more profound than Wilson's account of it. Indeed, it might be the biggest grenade lobbed toward the kind of studied posturing of bureaucrats and media commentators since Susan Faludi's 'Stiffed'. Razer's fairly simple analysis is that the urge to narrativise our personal stories into universal lessons is in fact a delusional attempt to draw the universal from something specific that may not have an universal point contained within it. And thus the bloated self-aggrandising subjective sense of self that goes with identity politics.

Helen Razer is very specific in how she mounts her argument, and it comes down to the simple fact that the bloated subjective appears to offer us handles for understanding other people, but is in fact a cul de sac of misunderstanding the problem. We are not object lessons in teachable life-experiences any more than we are our cars or jobs or bank account or vacations. Yes, Helen Razer arrives at the discarding of identity just like the space monkeys in 'Fight Club'. By doing so, she argues she can discard the stupid distraction of subjective narratives that are not in fact universals. i.e. you are not a unique beautiful snow flake, you are part of the all-singoing, all-dancing crap of the world, as per 'Fight Club'.

And maybe this is the thing. Maybe the University of Sydney student experience was always going to drive its students down an exploration of identity politics, given how half of the philosophy faculty was dedicated to unearthing the personal identity issues and making them political while the other half was busily working on a central state materialist epistemology and backing out of metaphysics. As Helen Razer puts it, the personal-is-political credo only takes you to the heart of stupid where we assign blame to a world we perceive to be arrayed against 'us' as an individual.

Personally, I don't care where it comes from, I find great validation in the idea that the bloated subjective attempting to draw out universal lessons from personal experience is a con, and the repetition of which is Stupid. We all should be better than just boasting on our badges or complaining upon our circumstance and happenstance. Yes, it is rather green and raw and undergraduate in its topic, but just as raw greens are healthy to eat, such discussions are necessary and good.

Jason Wilson's complaint that it is lacking in generosity misses the great gift the chapter gives us. It gives us the freedom not to be trapped by our own and everybody else's bloated subjective for once. To be us without the identity politics is actually liberating. It is the holy grail of existence to find footing in just being, absent of identity politics. Wilson's complaint could just as easily be dismissed as paternalism as it can be dismissed as his own personal anecdote.

Really, there is a lot of stupidity based on identity politics floating about, and it deserves to be pointed at and ridiculed for what it is.

We Want More Middlebrow?

Walk-off HBP sent me this link this morning which is worth picking over. It's essentially in praise of middlebrow and the suggestion that the Australian Film industry powers-that-be could do more by producing a film like 'The Water Diviner', more often.

According to the latest figures available, local films were tracking at a disastrous 2.3 percent share of the Australian box office in September 2014, the second lowest figure since 1977. Good reviews for some local titles made little or no difference. Neither did the industry’s relatively recent shift in emphasis to genre films. Witness the instant collapse of such touted titles as These Final Hours (science fiction), The Babadook (horror), Felony (crime) and The Little Death (sex comedy). 

Yet it’s not true that all Australian films failed to draw audiences to cinemas. Apart from the notable exception of Wolf Creek 2 (a campy sequel to a hit horror movie), last year’s most popular local (or part-local) films with Australian audiences fell into the middle ground: The Railway Man, a British-Australian co-production starring Nicole Kidman and Colin Firth, and Tracks, featuring Mia Wasikowska as the camel-trekker Robyn Davidson. 

Tracks’ $2 million-plus earnings reflected its relatively ‘arty’ exploration of a difficult character while its widescreen spectacle and literary connections anchored it into the middle ground as a reasonably marketable property. The Railway Man’s more impressive $7 million meanwhile reflected its star power and foreign locations (Burma and the UK – I’d be surprised if many viewers were even aware it was an Australian co-production).

You only need to see how the British film industry successfully carves out an audience in the teeth of competition from US blockbusters to see what too many Australian filmmakers and federal and state funding agencies are doing wrong in terms of winning over audiences.

Well... It's nice to know that critics still care but 2.3% market share is simply a terrible figure that reflects years of neglect and distrust more than anything else. If such figures are to be believed, then things are more dire, the audience numbers more dismal and the state of the industry is generally speaking, crap. Pandering more to middle-class prejudices won't necessarily bring the audience back. As being nowhere goes, we've sure come a long way towards oblivion.