Date: Fri, 22 Sep 2000 10:07:02 +1000
From: Gary MacLennan <g.maclennan-AT-qut.edu.au>
Subject: BHA: Culture & Critical Realism - making a difference: thoughts on the



>The theme of the Lancaster Conference on how or whether Critical Realism 
>makes a difference still resonates with me in the sense that I feel that 
>coming from the Critical Realist corner I still failed to answer it 
>adequately.  I hope to address that problem but the recent opening of the 
>Olympic Games provided me with qa thought an interesting 
>test.  Specifically what use is Critical Realism in an understanding of 
>the Opening Ceremony?


Turning to Bhaskar is not much of a direct help here.  He belongs very much 
in the camp of those who regards popular culture as a distraction, or a 
dummy resolution of the real problems that beset us.` Here his analysis 
owes much to the Marxist tradition of ideology critique as practised by 
Terry Eagleton in particular.

The distraction thesis is generally out of favour in Cultural Studies 
circles. Though in itself that should not necessarily be a deterrent from 
investigating it.  However I remain dissatisfied with simple blanket 
condemnations of the popular. I belong in the camp of those who see the 
popularity of an event as something significant and to be investigated 
seriously rather than condemned in a reflex manner.


I am assuming here that most of my readers tuned into at least some moments 
of the coverage. There are interesting questions that I am afraid I cannot 
answer.  The phenomenon of 'opening ceremonies' itself has to be 
explained.  When did they begin?  My impression is that Moscow in 1984 (?) 
marked the advent of what might be termed the aestheticisation of the 
opening ceremony.  Whatever the case the opening ceremony is now an 
occasion for a mass aesthetic spectacle, one which overshadows the 
traditional parade of the athletes. The Media's sponsorship of the Games is 
of crucial importance to the very survival of the event and in many ways 
the media calls forth the spectacle.  Not everyone is particularly 
interested in the athletes so the spectacle has acquired a very 
non-athletic flavour.


Having said all that I want to approach the Opening Ceremony in a slightly 
different way.  I want to begin from the fact of my own alienated 
responses.  This has a particularly relevant ring to it because as Mervyn 
pointed out, quite correctly in  my opinion, Bhaskar is now the philosopher 
par excellence of alienation. FEW is also in my opinion the most 'cultural' 
or aesthetic of Bhaskar's books and in some ways the most relevant for my 
particular purposes.  But this is a theme I hope to return to at a later date.

Sydney's version took up themes said to be associated with Australia.  We 
had sea, land and air themes with all sorts of exotic creations flickering 
in and out.  There were also allegedly Australian icons such as horsemen 
and whips, and lots of corrugated iron which was supposed to signify the 
Australian way of life.  (It never ceases to amaze me that a country such 
as Australia which is so thoroughly urban still clings to visions of itself 
as an essentially agrarian society.  To an extent this reflects the 
financial dominance of the primary industry sector but it also testifies to 
the continuing necessity of Romantic myths in modern societies.)

There were also lots of canonical moments played out in according to the 
rules of contemporary inter-texuality.  The use of the young girl permitted 
echoes of Alice in Wonderland and the Wizard of Oz. It also set the tone 
for the particular path that the re-enchantment of Australia would 
take.  In its homage to Hollywood the spectacle unconsciously acknowledged 
the internationalisation of the cultural and the very spuriousness of the 
claims to local difference that were encoded in the use of "typical" 
Australian motifs such as lawn mowers and corrugated iron.

Throughout the predominant cultural category was that of kitsch, produced 
self-consciously and on a massive scale.  High modernism a la ex-Trotskyist 
Clement Greenberg excoriated kitsch - the use of sentimentally popular 
cultural motifs and icons. Greenberg argued that kitsch emerges as a 
response to the new mass market created by industrialisation.  The former 
peasants had not the leisure to acquire "genuine" culture but they were 
bored and needed diversion.  Kitsch emerged then as a solution to the 
demand for  stimulation without the pain of acquiring a knowledge of the 
cultural norms of one's superiors, what is normally referred to as 'good 
taste'.  For Greenberg, kitsch was the 'epitome of all that is spurious in 
the life of our times.  Kitsch (pretended) to demand nothing of its 
customers except their money - not even their time' (Greenberg, 1992: 534).

The antithesis of kitsch was of course the high modernist avant 
garde.  However this was always a relationship of dialectical 
counterparts.  Predictably the relationship of mutual need between the 
avant garde and the peddlers of kitsch was to collapse under the impact of 
market forces.  We are left with the post modern where these is what 
Deleuze termed a 'slackening' in tastes.  The kitsch reigns supreme 
now.  The erstwhile avant gardist seeks transcendence not through the 
denial of kitsch but rather through sinking into its very embrace.  It 
reminds me  of nothing so much as Rimbaud's doctrine of salvation through 
sin.  Today's artists throw themselves on the market and transcendence if 
it is to be achieved at all assumes a quantitative (including 
monetary)dimension.  Thus the commentary on the Sydney Opening stressed 
that the marching band was the largest such ever assembled.  The fact that 
it was not so very good at marching or playing was irrelevant.

However if kitsch was the cultural dominant there were moments where 
something quite different was articulated.  I want to concentrate on 
these.  To reverse Bhaskar's metaphor from DPF, I want to consider the 
moments of negativity which floated on the vast sea of positive 
kitsch.  These for me fell into three categories.  Firstly there was the 
rabbit which the Captain Cook figure brought to Australia.  Here we had an 
acknowledgement of the ecological disasters that have been directly caused 
by European settlement.

Then there were the Ned Kelly figures.  Kelly was the Australian bush 
ranger, outlaw and primitive rebel par excellence.  For a long time he 
represented the anti-pauthroritarian culture in Australaia.  In this the 
most conformist of nations, the Ned Kelly cult was the nearest Australians 
could come to rejection the master class.  This Kelly was however mediated 
through the version painted by Sydney Nolan. So there was a double level of 
coding here.  We had a popular Australian legend, and then the cultural 
overlay on this.  In a typically postmodern fashion we had the promiscuous 
blending of the popular and high culture.

Despite this the use of Kelly, even a heavily mediated one, represented 
something of what John Pilger has termed Australia's secret past.  There is 
here an echo however faint of the history of Power2 relations of domination 
and exploitation.

The next moment of negativity for me was the entry of the Aboriginal 
women.  They came in a bare-breasted huddle.  Prior to this the Aboriginal 
component had been thoroughly choreographed into some tale loosely based on 
Alice in Wonderland and the Wizard of Oz.  However the wailing naked women 
were so thoroughly alien tome that they absented all the kitsch 
choreography.  Theirs was indeed a stark reminder of the absences brought 
about by white colonialisation.

The third and final moment I wish to consider was the women's relay to 
light the torch.  The choice of the Aboriginal star met with general 
approval.  Much of White Australia has demonstrated that it wants a 
reconciliation with Indigenous Australia. However as always with such 
'sorry' moments, the politics hovers within the hiatus between the 
dialectics of tokenism and those of genuine emancipation.  However there 
was it seems to me less tokenism about the choice to end the event with the 
old women athletes.  There was here an acknowledgement of the power of what 
Nancy Fraser has termed the politics of recognition.

The moments of negativity that I have discussed provided IMHO a tantalising 
glimpse of the possibility of a new politics based on

a) anti-Prometheanism,  the hero - explorer is shown to bring ecological 
disaster with him
b) an acknowledgement of Power2 relations of exploitation and also through 
the Ned Kelly figure of 4D level of resistance to oppression,
c) identity in difference; through the prominence given to Freeman and the 
other women there was something of a fleeting glimpse of the possibility 
that difference can be seen as something that unites rather than divides us.

regards

Gary






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