The Inspector-General of Misconception

by Frank Moorhouse

  These nerve centres are also places of ideological conflict because they provide regular forums for this conflict – prize-awarding panels, management committees, selection committees, policy formulation groups, curricula committees, staff meetings, and so on.

  It is at these points where the Australian cultural wars are seething and fuming even if the battlelines are not yet fully public.

  In our analysis, we will be drawing on arts policy generally as well as that which is specifically applied to writing.

  The contest for official culture

  The most obvious places for literary political conflict is in the state ministries of arts and the Australia Council where funding and major prize-judging panels are controlled both by bureaucrats and by advisory boards.

  There are more arts ‘prizes’ than those which are advertised as prizes.

  The officially encouraged shaping or redirection of culture is carried on through official prizes such as prizes for ‘best multicultural book’ or the best work showing concern for reconciliation, or awards for works which celebrate the Year of the Family and so on.

  There are other ‘prizes’ which are part of official social engineering and foreign policy.

  The former government had arts and cultural policies aimed at ‘orienting’ us towards Asia.

  This redirection of the arts policy is done by government funding for travel and study, to the use of educational funding and incentives to establish courses which lead students in a certain direction, the use of university positions and professorship and courses to bring about a political outcome not simply related to fundamental educational or arts goals.

  We are not saying that this is a vicious state control of the arts nor is it totalitarian. It is more a political tilting of education and the arts funding.

  But it endorses a mindset which happily accepts the infringement of the autonomy of the individual writer. The only acceptable arts funding policy is for the funding body to get to the writer the resources that the writer believes he or she needs to carry through his or her artistic project and/or to carry through a productive life in the arts. That is, it can be a funding commitment to a project or simply to a writer.

  Censorship, the most obvious form of state control of the arts, is now creeping back after being defeated in the seventies and is now drawing its rationale from contemporary hysterias and puritanism.

  What are the positions of those fighting for control of the arts?

  The Asianists

  We came across it in an SBS program where a group of arts administrators were talking about the future of the performing arts. Another example was encountered in Lismore when writing centre administrator Peter Barclay told a dinner for Robert Drewe that the orientation towards Asia must be expected in Australian writing because we would one day be ‘Asian’ and the bulk of our population would be ‘Asian’ (of course, Asian is a mixture of very different cultures). It was spoken as a foregone conclusion of history and although without necessarily any detectable enthusiasm for life under such an imagined state, it was said with some of that peculiar bitter? angry? relish or fervour for the devastation or collapse or ruin of our present political and cultural system.

  As we listened to these two examples, we decided that there were Asianists in our political spectrum.

  We define the Asianist as a person who desires that Australia, through the passing of time and immigration, should (as a politically or morally desirable thing) become ethnically ‘Asian’ (whatever that may mean) with an inevitable obliteration of the European or contemporary ethnic and cultural mix.

  The Asianist seeks to accelerate this, and welcomes this, and promotes this through their own efforts, and by lobbying for government policies which accelerate and facilitate this.

  We suspect that it is a form of anti-Westernism and a belief in the superiority of vaguely understood, even spurious, ‘Asian values’.

  It may contain within it a recognition (or a hope or a belief) that eventually over the centuries all the races of the world will become coffee-coloured through intermarrying and that thus racial prejudice will cease to exist.

  It may also be driven by guilt from the old White Australia days.

  It is a position in direct conflict with what Les Murray, known jokingly as poet laureate of the National Party, calls the Settler Position.

  The Akubra or Settler Position

  There is a feeling among some of the literary community, says Les Murray, and around Quadrant, that a cultural stream of attitude, sentiment and memory is being bullied out of existence.

  This Anglo-Celtic or Settler Tradition argues that not only can we not escape a set of tight historical facts, or readings of these facts, we should endorse and celebrate these. Those facts are that post-1788, Australia was initially settled by the British and this fundamental influence will continue, will dominate the arts, and will alter all who come to settle here.

  It can be widened slightly to the ‘European Tradition’.

  They see the Settler Tradition as providing the dominant political and cultural guiding ethos – the Australian ethos.

  This is not only a position of the political conservatives. The Old Left have a stake in this heritage also. They have a concern for preserving what they see as the trade union mateship ethos and the cooperative traditions of labour (mateship and the fair-go were always a fallacy; look at those excluded from its embrace – women, gays, foreigners, indigenous people and often intellectuals and artists).

  As an extension of this, the conservative usually co-opts the ‘literary tradition’ in a rather narrow way.

  It comes from a misguided application of high art snobbery which masquerades as cultural guardianship. It uses nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century university-acceptable English writing as models of imaginative excellence and rewards and praises mimicry of these models. This snobbery fails to be open to the appearance of literary work when it comes from unexpected genres, employs experimental strategies, or is the work of socially unsavoury authors.

  It tends to favour those works which mimic the literary tradition rather than those which are practising the innovative demands of the Western literary tradition.

  Patchwork Quilt Multiculturalism

  Some efforts have been made to ‘equalise down’ the Anglo-Celtic Tradition to be one among many multicultural parts of the Australian mosaic.

  The Settler heritage is very uneasy about fitting into multiculturalism as being one among many.

  However, the multiculturalists basically argue that instead of being a side-prize in literary awards, they should be part of the criteria for all prizes.

  Red Flag Left

  We had not expected to find evidence of a continued existence of the Old Communist Left position on the arts; that is, only art which supports (or preferably arises from) the ‘working class’ or proletariat is acceptable.

  In the fifties, and into the sixties, the Communist Party was the major patron of the arts in Australia. It had funds for overseas travel to communist countries; it controlled significant literary prizes such as the Mary Gilmore Prize; it had its own literary magazines; its writers’ centre (the Realist Writers’ Groups); its own annual anthology; and a book publishing company, The Australasian Book Society.

  We had believed that this was an exhausted position. Not so. Although the evidence comes from Humphrey McQueen’s book about the painter, Tom Roberts, it is based on a position applicable to the literary arts as well.

  Talking of his book, McQueen said, ‘Roberts’ place in Australian history and culture is up there with … Lawson and Paterson … who perpetuate our image of what constitutes the genuine Australian Legend.’

  Please note the idea of a ‘genuine Australian Legend’.

  ‘People see Roberts as a Lawson-type struggle, praising the dignity of rural labour and working classes as one of them, but he wasn’t at all.’

  Gee whiz, Humphrey.

  ‘Roberts was a friend of
the squattocracy, vain about his physical fitness and appearance, wore fine suits, a red satin-lined opera cape …’

  But worse.

  ‘He spoke fluent French, sailed saloon class to and from England … was always the businessman artist, heavily into self-promotion, hobnobbing with figures who mattered in Australian society from landed gentry and businessmen and their wives, politicians, the law, people in music, theatre – all the arts.’

  Grim stuff.

  It could be that Humphrey is the only living person who holds such a romantic view of the importance of the relationship between the artist and the proletariat.

  Or for that matter, such a romantic view of the artist that ‘self-promotion’ and business-like care for one’s talent is seen as discrediting.

  The Grim Separatists

  In the Australian arts, there has emerged a broader form of multiculturalism from that which is expressed officially about ethnicity. It is a Separatist Position.

  The Separatist will oppose the appropriation of his or her culture by an outsider; feels that it is a no-go area for those who are not inheritors of his or her tradition or epistemology.

  So, some writers say that only women should write about women, only gays about gays, only those of the working class about the working class.

  It goes further than who should write about what. It goes to the disqualification of who should read or, in the case of visual arts, see the work.

  A report in the Sydney Morning Herald tells of an exhibition of lesbian art in Sydney where some lesbians declined to be involved because they didn’t want to exhibit to ‘mixed’ audiences.

  This is, of course, a sexist generalisation by those lesbians about males or heterosexuals and their ‘ways of seeing’.

  An example was an academic who accused white Australians of ‘stealing’ Aboriginal knowledge and stories.

  Separatists tend to argue that all art is trapped in its ideology and that there are only good and bad ideologies and that good art is that which expresses and serves good ideologies.

  They would dispute that writing can fulfil the literary mission as described, say, by Lionel Trilling, ‘to liberate the individual from the tyranny of his culture … to permit him to stand beyond it in an autonomy of perception and judgment’.

  Queer Anti-Separatists

  Some are fighting back against this.

  Gregg Araki, who made the film The Doom Generation: A Heterosexual Film says that he wants to escape such categorisation. ‘What I wanted to do is to subvert the whole categorisation of movies as gay films or straight films.’

  This is the position of ‘Queer culture’ which wants to include bisexuals, transsexuals, gays, lesbians and ‘other than straights’ into a new alliance, and the abandonment of ‘labels’.

  As with movements such as the Rainbow Coalition, Queerdom is too inclusive, too embracing, to be an entity with a substantial boundary.

  The Above-it-All Cosmopolitan Tradition

  Unlike the Separatists, the Cosmopolitan Tradition is untrammelled by ideas of respectfulness of other cultures or boundaries.

  It believes in the ultimate authority of the imagination which can travel across gender, travel across cultures, travel across centuries, travel across age.

  This upsets the Separatist Position because the Cosmopolitan imagination does not recognise no-go areas; not that is, on the basis of ideology, only on the basis of the artist recognising his or her own self-limitations.

  Cosmopolitanism is perhaps not the best term and we wish to use it neutrally. It comes out of arguments last century in other places such as Germany and Russia where the artists who believed in opening themselves to all influences were called the Cosmopolitans and were opposed by those calling themselves Nationalists who saw the true nurturing of art in exclusively engaging with the country of birth, finding one’s own standards and forms of artistic expression.

  It can be a desire for an internationalist, single world culture or art, but ultimately it produces an art which embroiders itself as the individual artist sees fit.

  Its standards may be international, but it is not Internationalist in that it desires uniformity. So the Russian expressionists were different from the Spanish and French and other expressionists, yet all were being inspired by influences coming from France at the time.

  It sometimes expresses itself as love affairs with New York or Paris or London or Prague, with other cultural traditions which are seen as super-enriched.

  In a mature culture such as Australia, it does not mean the production of only hybrid forms or creativity inspired by overseas movements. But an economically weak or under-resourced culture can be overwhelmed by a more dynamic outside culture such as the US, at least temporarily.

  Government policies have been used to ‘protect’ the culture from outside influences, especially in some Asian and Islamic countries, but also in Australia from time to time.

  The big virtue of the Cosmopolitan Tradition is that it is inclusive.

  It would find things to admire in writing which came out of any of the above ideological positions: the reverse is not true.

  And finally, the Cosmopolitan Tradition has woven in it a certain raffishness. It proclaims a disdain for art which defends itself as socially redeeming.

  The Cosmopolitan Tradition does not, at its best, seek political or artistic respectability.

  It is, to quote Oscar Wilde’s mother (for once) in describing her family, as ‘above respectability’. It is a position that, like the Wildes, can be romantically arrogant about the supreme rights of the imagination.

  However. The interesting thing about the above chart of the literary or arts ideologies is that they have not yet been debated at conferences or festival panels.

  They remain hidden in committee argument.

  Some, such as the Separatists would argue that ‘open discussion’ is only part of the oppression.

  But it is perhaps about time that the positions were dragged out from their smoke-free back rooms into the intellectual glare.

  AN INQUIRY INTO THE PLAGUE OF DECONSTRUCTION

  The Inspectorate has been asked as a matter of urgency to investigate the alarm around the words ‘deconstruction’, ‘post-modern’, and ‘post-structuralist’.

  Author Christopher Koch raised the flurry on the prize-giving night of the Miles Franklin Award when he said that deconstructionism (and ‘post-structuralists’) ‘seeks to discredit and destroy all natural genius, all true originality. Behind it stands the shadow of totalitarianism; of thought control.’

  He called on the young to rise up against their deconstructing masters.

  In the Australian newspaper a few days later, he was joined by Jonathan Bowden, a painter, who further stirred the flurry by stating that deconstructionists (and post-modernists) wanted to destroy beauty.

  ‘So far as they say anything at all, they say do whatever you like, believe whatever you like, think whatever you like.’

  We would like to say at this point that this does not sound to us like a prescription for totalitarianism. It may be a prescription for mindlessness but not for control by an encompassing state doctrine.

  Whatever other charges may be substantiated against the demons (we will consider deconstruction, post-structuralists and post-modernists as the one defendant for purposes of this controversy), we dismiss the charge of post-modernism or deconstruction being a ‘totalitarian’ movement by definition.

  Editorials expressing the fear of deconstruction have also appeared in some of the major newspapers.

  We inquired of those scholars around us. What is deconstruction? What is post-modernism?

  The short answer came back thus: Deconstruction, a theory which took hold in the seventies, is an intellectual tool by which the critic attempts to know things about an imaginative work that the work cannot know about itself (that is, if the critic is good enough and the theory being applied useful enough).

  At its most benign it is a critical
search for the other ideological meanings concealed within the work and an investigation of the political or philosophical main-springs of the imaginative work. It is also an investigation of the philosophical basis for ‘art’.

  The Inquiry applauds this. We, ourselves, enjoy a good hidden meaning.

  However, we have found that some ‘searches’ for hidden meanings are usually undertaken in the service of ideologies or value systems which are themselves deeply problematic eg. Marxism, or still-emerging, gender theory.

  The value or weight or precision of most ‘hidden meanings’ when allegedly discovered are themselves open to sophisticated dispute.

  And it is ever thus. And it is true that we cannot suspend all judgments until our hypotheses have matured. We should though, tread softly and temper our judgments conscious of the central truth which cultural studies gives us – that is, the unreliability and changeability of ideologies and critical systems.

  The Old Lefties were true Enemies of the Imagination and their state systems demonstrated this, rather than the deconstructionists who are, in fact, seen as enemies of the Left.

  Marxist literary critic (although his Marxist credentials are now under question by whoever it is that questions Marxist credentials these days) Fredric Jameson argues that, ‘pleasing, exciting and beautiful stories promote an acquiescence to, and even identification with, the relations of domination and subordination so peculiar to the late capitalist social order …’

  ‘Nothing can be more satisfying to a Marxist teacher,’ says Jameson, ‘than to break this fascination for students.’

  Paul de Man, the leading deconstructionist theorist, does share something of this incapacity to enjoy art as art. But deconstructionists are not a state-in-waiting.

  He was determined not to succumb to the seduction of art and his work offers negative accounts of the aesthetic pleasure.

  As Wendy Steiner, a former student and now leading literary scholar says, ‘It takes a real devotee [of de Man] to be satisfied with only such theoretical revelations.’