Nowadays the social and anthropological definition of ‘culture’ is probably gaining as much public currency as the aesthetic one. Particularly in Australia, politicians are liable to speak of the vital need for a domestic film industry in ‘promoting our cultural identity’—and they mean by ‘cultural identity’ some sense of Australianness, of our nationalism as a distinct form of social organisation. Notably, though, the emphasis tends to be on Australian film (not popular television); and not just any film, but those of ‘quality’. So the aesthetic definition tends to be smuggled back in—on top of the kind of cultural nationalism which assumes that ‘Australia’ is a unified entity with certain essential features that distinguish it from ‘Britain’, the ‘USA’ or any other national entities which threaten us with ‘cultural dependency’.
This series is titled ‘Australian Cultural Studies’, and I should say at the outset that my understanding of ‘Australian’ is not as an essentially unified category; and further, that my understanding of cultural is anthropological rather than aesthetic. By ‘culture’ I mean the social production of meaning and understanding, whether in the inter-personal and practical organisation of daily routines or in broader institutional and ideological structures. I am not thinking of ‘culture’ as some form of universal ‘excellence’, based on aesthetic ‘discrimination’ and embodied in a pantheon of ‘great works’. Rather, I take this aesthetic definition of culture itself to be part of the social mobilisation of discourse to differentiate a cultural ‘élite’ from the ‘mass’ of society.
Unlike the cultural nationalism of our opinion leaders, ‘Cultural Studies’ focuses not on the essential unity of national cultures, but on the meanings attached to social difference (as in the distinction between ‘élite’ and ‘mass’ taste). It analyses the construction and mobilisation of these distinctions to maintain or challenge existing power differentials, such as those of gender, class, age, race and ethnicity. In this analysis, terms designed to socially differentiate people (like ‘élite’ and ‘mass’) become categories of discourse, communication and power. Hence our concern in this series is for an analytical understanding of the meanings attached to social difference within the history and politics of discourse.
It follows that the analysis of ‘texts’ needs to be untied from a single-minded association with ‘high’ culture (marked by ‘authorship’), but must include the ‘popular’ too—since these distinctions of ‘high’ and ‘popular’ culture themselves need to be analysed, not assumed. Graeme Turner’s National Fictions, reprinted here in its second edition, engages with both ‘high’ and ‘popular’ culture directly. It is the first book in Australian studies to analyse seriously the cultural construction of narratives in both ‘high’ literature and ‘popular’ film; and this has been fundamental to the book’s success since its first publication in 1986. As Turner says in his new Preface, the ‘book deals with both media in order to lead readers across the disciplinary divide towards new angles of inspection and, hopefully, new knowledge’.
Culture, as Turner argues, is the primary subject of this book rather than film or literature in themselves, and this is because ‘narratives are ultimately produced by the culture; . . . they generate meanings, take on a significance, and assume forms that are articulations of the values, beliefs—the ideology—of the culture’. Given the view that texts are the productions of culture, Turner focuses here more on ‘the similarities than the differences between individual texts—in other words with the common or dominant forms and meanings in Australian culture’. This approach does not, however, homogenise ‘common meanings’ in some nationalistically essentialising way: ‘the focus upon Australian narrative is not an exercise in nationalism but an enquiry into those determinants of narrative which are culturally specific’. Above all, the emphasis here on cultural specificity rejects the naturalistic representation of ‘society as a trap’ (as Raymond Williams put it). Turner examines in this book a series of social ‘alibis’ that have been reproduced repeatedly within Australian narrative texts on behalf of the status quo—in, for instance, the bush myth, and in the representation of convictism. ‘The context becomes one in which the bush and the prison offer the same limited range of possibilities for the individual: the environment is tough, but survivable if one accepts its basic domination over the self Images of nature—such as the harsh Australian landscape—thus become at the same time images of culture because they suggest that ‘survival is all, resistance is futile, and ideals are to be tempered by contingency’. Together, the dominant themes of a colonial Australia construct a pattern of acceptance, accommodation and assent, ‘posing as the “natural” structure of existence within an Australian context’. In this way, Australian narrative fictions have worked too often in a consensualising way, ‘to obscure differences and divisions that may well need to be recognised and addressed’.
At the end of the book Turner warns us—in reviewing possibly oppositional elements within Australian narratives—that we should not remember only the ‘dominant patterns’ and ‘monistic conclusions’. In some narratives, ‘the realist depiction of non-consensual views of life which constructs the identification between the viewer and the characters living that life may well be interrogative, proposing rather a critical analysis of Australian society’. In other cases, formal breaks with naturalism can have ‘the potential for dislodging the viewer from a comfortable position of knowing and accepting’. Still, in the end even these ‘resistive’ tendencies are ‘contained within the general framework of meanings of the culture . . . which still strives to appropriate these groups’ expression as its own’. Turner follows Levi-Strauss, Will Wright and others in seeing narrative as a symbolic resolution to social contradictions; he insists on the construction of culture out of social divisions, and examines ways in which national myth ‘serves to override and silence the less powerful voices in the culture’. On the other hand, though, he emphasises the need to look constantly for signs of ‘renovation or resistance’. The enduring value of his book is in articulating that tension through the texts of Australian ‘high’ and ‘popular’ culture. As he says in his new Preface, if ‘our narratives do make it easier for us to accept our social powerlessness or for us to overlook the inequities and divisions within our society, then this is a cause for concern’.
Culture, as Fiske, Hodge and Turner say in Myths of Oz, grows out of the divisions of society, not its unity. ‘It has to work to construct any unity that it has, rather than simply celebrate an achieved or natural harmony.’ Australian culture is then no more than the temporary, embattled construction of ‘unity’ at any particular historical moment. The ‘readings’ in this series of ‘Australian Cultural Studies’ inevitably (and polemically) form part of the struggle to make and break the boundaries of meaning which, in conflict and collusion, dynamically define our culture.