VIRTUAL RADICALS
A friend had told me about Mark
Davis’ Gangland and the fuss it had
been creating. I bought myself a copy. She had also told me there was to be a
forum featuring Davis, columnist Catherine Lumby and McKenzie Wark who has
recently brought out his latest book. The three authors were being considered
as significant in a challenge to those who hold ideological/political, real power. They were offering a
challenge to the neo as well as the more traditional sort of conservative.
However, we couldn’t discover when the forum was to be held. My friend thought
I had probably missed it.
I was disappointed as I had had time
to glance at Davis’ book and it appears to mention lesbian, gay or queer issues
(which particularly interest me) only in relation to Christos Tsiolkas’s novel Loaded. A ‘Christos T’ is also mentioned
in the Introduction, part of a coy
thank you list. What sort of a radical, what sort of a Post Modernist could
Mark Davis be? And I do want to know what the new power elites are up to
themselves.
The next day I set out for the rally
in support of Native Title being held in Sydney’s Domain. On my way I passed
the Gunnery in Woolloomooloo. I was early so I popped in to see the current art
exhibition - supposedly some British/Australian artistic dialogue. It seemed
quite awful but to tell the truth I didn’t give it more than a glance - a panel
and discussion show was to start at 3 and lo and behold it was the very one I
had wanted to attend - After the Culture
Wars. The title of Wark’s new book is The
Virtual Republic Australia’s
culture wars of the 1990s.
I rushed my reluctant sinews up the
new stairs from the ‘Loo to the Domain, donated some money, signed a petition
and dashed back to my happy find.
Paid my $5, got a hand-written
receipt and I was in.
Davis, who had been flown up from
Melbourne for this event by the Gunnery crowd, spoke first. His actual presence
confirmed an impression I got from his book - that he is at pains to present as
an average sort of bloke, unprepossessing, not a hint of zealotry. During the
forum he was to go to quite extraordinary lengths to placate everybody. Lumby
spoke second. She’s got style. The look is Louise Brooks gone Tarantino hard.
She reminded me of Dame Leonie Kramer. She and Dame Leonie are polar opposites
but in their own ways they’ve got the Right Style. To take them places. Lumby
is also possessed by the Charged Presence - charged with a shimmer of
self-righteousness, the vigilant hostile assertiveness born of a consciousness
that Woman is ever in immanent danger of being Wronged. By her older Sisters as
well as Men these days, it seems. Wark, under the ghastly glare of the two
inquisitorial spots and behind a yellow and black acrylic furred podium, looked
like a character out of a film by
Murnau transmorphed onto an Aldomovar set. He spoke, as he always does,
cogently but less intensely than when he is berating a lesbian and gay audience
for our insularity. I think the application being employed might have been Soft
Pedagogy 7.1.
Oh all three were sort of plausible.
Lumby spiced her account of contemporary ideology/life with an instructive
anecodote about how traditional Feminist Jocelyn Scutt had got Madonna utterly
wrong. Scutt was convinced the two big black men she had seen hurrying Madonna
along on t v were evidence of the performer’s patriarchal pawn status when in
fact they were of course the bodyguards the entertainer employs. The male
speakers didn’t say anything as memorable though I do recall Pauline Hanson’s
name being mentioned and Mark Davis having a go at being funny about ‘little
Johnny Howard and the thin line of foam on his upper lip’. He seemed to have
the taste to realise it was too repulsive an image to get much of a laugh out
of.
Their addresses were obliterated in
my mind by what the audience, invited to question and contribute, made of their
opportunity.
The event looked packed to me, that
is to say, all seventy-five chairs had bums on them. We were not though a
various crowd. I’d say half were acolytes of Lumby and Wark and that most were
Post Modern, Generation X ... whatever.
Someone, a bitter taxi-driver with a
Ph D, asked Wark (while assuring us all that he could ask this rude question
because they were really mates) if Wark mentioned his bisexuality a lot in Higher Education because it ensured his job. Wark
replied with charm something to the effect that we all have our ploys, or so it
seems in my recollection
Another man, explaining he had
industrial deafness due to driving a taxi (it used to be lung complaints from
working alongside the miners), asked a long question. Its elaborateness and his
familiarity with Wark suggested he also had a Ph D. The ‘question’ was about -
do you blokes employ Post Modern jargon to exclude the Working Man? All of the
panel seemed to have a go at answering that one. No clear response could
reasonably have been expected.
Then a John MacDonald (the art
critic?) asked some hard questions. It seemed to him that it wasn’t true, as
Mark Davis had asserted (and Lumby had emphatically nodded her assent to), that
those who complained of the debilitating effects of affirmative action on
educational standards in the U S were making an implicitly racist statement.
This point was developed in discussion along the lines of which Bloom (Harold
or Allan) had actually written what and what in any case they had intended. Its
relation to the Australian experience was not clearly sustained. MacDonald,
demanding rigour, came across as wanting to defend something traditional,
something in the way of the conservative. This line of exploration was
skilfully interrupted by Wark who was acting as Chair. MacDonald had previously
taken Lumby up extensively on her use of a categorising term (was it ‘neo
conservative’?) and asked her how she would categorise herself. ‘Post Modern
Feminist Libertarian’ is my memory of the reply. Lumby began by thanking
Macdonald for his question but ended a lengthy and increasingly defiant response
unable to suppress a triumphant flick of the bangs as she made her way back to her seat.
The term ‘Post Modern’ was examined
at length by panelists and some audience members. No-one would admit to
embracing being one. It is apparently not something that one actually has to
commit to; we are all Post Modern, as someone living in 1890 was Victorian.
Post Modernism was opposed to notions
of a traditional literary canon and the ‘shape’ of things rather than their
actual content was the preferred manner of some for examining some things. One
audience member posited a cool clear pond and a hot tub. He then placed
Shakespeare in the latter.
It was more or less on this note that
the forum was concluded by Wark.
I had some joy of it - ‘gay’ was
mentioned once, as an afterthought to a short list of other minorities.
Feminism and racism got the most mentions, it seemed to me, though almost
nothing concrete was said about either.
I’d say the titles of the panelists’
books were mentioned about as often. All their books, published by Allen and
Unwin, were available for sale at the back of the hall courtesy of Gleebooks.
The rally going on up in the Domain
was not alluded to once, by anyone.
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