thoughts occasioned by Lou's post Re: Rethinking Marxism

[Gary MacLennan <g.maclennan@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Lou

this was an extraordinarily interesting post for my particular
purposes.   Here at Queensland University of Technology, the uni plus the
state govt have launched what they call the 'creative industries
initiative'.  It parallels similar initiatives especially in Europe. The
State Govt put in a miserly $15 million (A).  Such, though, is the state of
funding to Higher Ed that the university almost passed out with joy.

Currently we are re-organising the Arts faculty to fit in with the Creative
Industries.  The fact that no-one knows what these are seems a truly minor
point.  We have been deluged with hype about the 'new economy', the 'new
media' and 'post-Fordism'. Everywhere the word 'digital' is used as a kind
of talisman or charm to keep off the wary or the critical. Someone is even
talking of devising a unit on the 'language of non-linear media'.

The piece below from your post is in many ways typical of the sort of
document that has been circulated. Though there has been nothing here with
such echoes of Marxist type analysis.



>CULLENBERG, AMARIGLIO, RUCCIO:  "Be that as it may, we note again that for
>many literary and cultural theorists like Jameson, the realm of the
>postmodern denotes rampant commodification, unchecked by oppositional
>forces--avant-gardes, say--that find themselves subverted or even co-opted
>by the very power and allure of the market. And, again, this world
>structured according to the object-life of the commodity has been thought
>to have received an enormous recent boost by the emergence of new
>information technologies, especially the internet. According to this view,
>computers have made commodity time and space ultimately traversable in ways
>unthinkable for past generations of producers and consumers. In addition to
>the use of computer technology in such "post-Fordist" production methods as
>"flexible specialization," it is claimed that one need not leave one's
>chair (in front of one's screen, of course) to be bombarded by commodity
>images and the cornucopia of goods that exist and are transacted in
>cyberspace. This obliteration of previous constraints of time and
>geographical location in buying and selling (lowering considerably
>transactions costs and reducing to rubble other past barriers to the
>international flow of financial capital and goods) reconstructs all notions
>and experiences pertaining to community and nation, hence the idea of the
>"global economy" that is said to be the hallmark of the postmodern.



Your response, stressing the continuities of class power and the
appropriation of surplus value, was wonderful in its oh so typical mordant
clarity.

But there are other continuities within the cultural realm which gobble de
gook about 'digital' and 'virtual' tend to obscure.  For a start there is
no new art form.  The digitalists might of course find one.  Who can
say?  But even so, any new form will still spring from the fundamental
necessity of art, that is it will seek to provide the moment of
transcendence. As such it will have to spring from a philosophical and
political realism about the world, even though in its presentation the art
may not take a realist form.

At a faculty meeting last year a student said something which was so honest
and important that it was of necessity immediately ignored by the
academics.  She pointed out that she had gained a lot of knowledge on how
to use the computer and had a range of sophisticated technical skills but
she still did not know what to say. The digitalists were conspicuously
silent. The reality is that they have nothing to say about reality. And now
as you pointed out that the postmodernist game of denying the existence of
reality has finally run out of steam, they have even less to offer but the
kind of puffed up, self- generating hype about the new media that one would
expect from a marketing executive.


So I think we are in the middle of a new round of the old game of
'trahaison des clercs'. Instead of exploring ways in which the new media
can be used to emancipate the oppressed, we are being urged to take up the
new media as yet another alternative to genuinely creative and radical
thought. It is as if the academics depressed by the failure of the left and
the quiescence of the working class have turned to worship capital through
the mediation of the computer based technologies.


All of this means of course that the Creative Industries will not be so
creative.  Or if creativity does happen it will be despite and not because
of the academy or the market which it is so anxious to serve.

regards

Gary