Journal articles: 'Accueil des publics – France – 1990-' – Grafiati (2024)

Abstract:

Depuis le début des années 1970, les politiques publiques ont joué un rôle moteur dans le développement des pratiques sportives et dans la structuration du système sportif français. Dans ce contexte, l’État, les régions, les départements, les villes et les structures intercommunales ont pris une place importante dans l’organisation des événements. Largement financés sur fonds publics, les événements sportifs internationaux conduisent à des discours de légitimation dans lesquels les arguments économiques sont très présents. Dans ce cadre, l’impact touristique est évidemment valorisé puisque l’événement provoque un flux de touristes nationaux ou internationaux qui viendront consommer sur le territoire concerné. En s’appuyant sur une recherche empirique sur « l’impact économique et social de la Coupe du monde de rugby 2007 en Île-de-France », la contribution analyse les stratégies volontaristes qui visent à séduire certaines catégories de touristes et à gérer au mieux leur accueil et leurs déplacements site sportif/centre-ville/sites touristiques.

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RésuméDepuis les années 1980 et 1990, les contestations associatives en France sont caractérisées par l’importance croissante des enjeux d’expertises. C’est dans ce cadre que s’est constituée la théorie desforums hybrideset sa rapide diffusion dans le monde de la recherche et des administrations. Une nouvelle perspective de transformation des espaces publics s’ébauche ainsi, qui s’appuie sur des conflits, des luttes paysagères et des expérimentations urbaines. Elle s’alimente du refus multiforme de l’expertise au motif que la preuve scientifique évacue le sensible et l’imaginaire. Les acteurs de ces contestations critiquent lastigmatisation NIMBY, mais ils refusent de se justifier, demonter en généralitépour se conformer aux modèles de l’intérêt général. Il nous semble que le refus de l’expertise et les conflits paysagers expriment une stratégie nouvelle d’esthétisation des espaces publics, stratégie qui tire les leçons de la période précédente, caractérisée par des conflits d’expertise et qui s’appuie sur les liens de proximité et le jugement esthétique pour tenter de transformer l’espace public et, du même coup, les règles du débat public.

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Cet article vise à étudier les représentations cinématographiques des couples franco-étrangers qui remettent en question les idées reçues sur ce type d’union en offrant une vision plus nuancée que celle, diffusée par les pouvoirs publics, selon laquelle l’institution du mariage serait menacée par le développement des « mariages blancs » (Ferran 2009). En effet, le mariage comme stratégie adoptée par les migrants afin de rester en France semble avoir moins attiré l’attention des réalisateurs français que d’autres sujets relatifs à la mixité amoureuse. Les films choisis pour l’analyse mettent successivement en scène un couple qui envisage précipitamment le mariage pour éviter l’expulsion d’un des conjoints, le mariage comme moyen de régularisation qui met néanmoins un terme à une relation, le mariage qui n’est faux que pour l’un des conjoints, et le cas des « promises par correspondance ».

Abstract:

Les politiques de la nature sont marquées par des questions nouvelles sur la place à accorder à une liste toujours plus longue et hétérogène de prétendants à la vie publique. Plus d’un demi-siècle après leur disparition complète, les loups réapparaissent en France au début des années 1990. Depuis lors, les paroles se sont amplifiées, propagées et ont pris très vite les tournures d’une véritable dispute publique. Pourtant, l’animal en chair et en os reste bien souvent invisible et insaisissable. Cet article interroge les conditions de possibilité de la présence publique des loups à partir de trois « modes corporels » de loups : le corps entier, le corps disséminé et le corps recomposé. Il tente de répondre successivement à trois questions : comment les loups échappent-ils aux dispositifs de contrôle de la nature ? Comment font-ils acte de présence ? Comment se présentent-ils aux publics ?

Abstract:

Résumé L'une des justifications juridiques de la puissance publique est, en France, la responsabilité de produire et maintenir l'interdépendance sociale, c'est-à-dire la solidarité organique. Dans le domaine du développement urbain, l'État a cherché depuis plus de 40 ans, à travers différentes politiques, à partager cette responsabilité avec d'autres acteurs, issus de la société civile ou institutionnels. Dans les années 1960, les associations constituent son partenaire privilégié dans les nouveaux quartiers d'habitat collectif, grâce à la gestion des équipements collectifs nouvellement créés. Puis, au début des années 1980, l'État responsabilise les communes, au moyen de contrats d'action publique. Enfin, dans les années 1990 et 2000, les services publics sont incités à prendre leur part de responsabilité dans la solidarité urbaine, au moyen d'instruments de type discrimination positive. Bien que ces « appels à la responsabilité » se déroulent largement dans la sphère publique, ils montrent que la responsabilisation constitue un outil de gouvernement au moins aussi important que l'injonction à l'obéissance.

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James D. Herbert, Paris 1937: Worlds on Exhibition (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998), 207 pp., £31.50, ISBN 0-801-43494-7. Andrea Kupfer Schneider, Creating the Musée d'Orsay. The Politics of Culture in France (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998), 150 pp., $25.00, ISBN 0-271-01752-X. Juan Pedro Lorente, Cathedral of Urban Modernity. The First Museums of Contemporary Art, 1800–1930 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998), £47.50, ISBN 1-859-28383-7. Ministère de la Culture et de la Communication, Direction des Musées de France, Centre national de la Recherche Scientifique, Centre de Sociologie des Organisations, Musée National du Moyen Age, Publics et projets culturels. Un enjeu des musées en Europe. Actes des Journées d'étude 26 et 27 octobre 1998, Paris, Musée national du Moyen Age (Paris: L'Harmattan, 2000), price not given, ISBN 2-738-48645-2. Paul Rasse, Les Musées à la lumière de l'espace public. Histoire, évolution, enjeux (Paris: L'Harmattan, Logiques Sociales, 1999), 238 pp., price not given, ISBN 2-738-47769-0. Selma Reuben Holo, Beyond the Prado. Museums and Identity in Democratic Spain (Liverpool University Press, 1999), 222 pp., price not given, ISBN 0-853-23535-X. Brandon Taylor, Art for the Nation. Exhibitions and the London Public 1747–2001 (Manchester University Press, 1990), 314 pp., price not given, ISBN 0-719-05452-4.

Abstract:

On a reconnu le rôle important que les Éditions Ipomée ont joué dans la renaissance de l’édition jeunesse en France à partir des années 1970. Mais leurs livres marquent aussi une étape notable dans le parcours de ce que l’on appelle dans le monde anglo-saxon la littérature « crossover ». Les livres pour tous les âges existent depuis des siècles mais ce n’est que vers la fin des années 1990 que l’on commence à parler du phénomène du « crossover ». Au début, on avait tendance à réserver le terme aux romans et à passer sous silence les albums et les livres illustrés, bien que ces genres soient plus susceptibles que tout autre à s’adresser à tous les publics. Déjà, dès les années 1970, les Éditions Ipomée, avec quelques autres maisons d’édition innovatrices, publiaient des albums qui remettaient en question les conventions et les codes traditionnels de la littérature de jeunesse et offraient aux lecteurs de véritables albums « crossover ». Cet article veut rendre hommage aux Éditions Ipomée et à tous leurs collaborateurs, autant de « funambules », qui ont su se balancer sur la corde raide tendue au-dessus du gouffre entre littérature jeunesse et littérature pour adultes.Mots clés : crossover, les livres pour tous les âges, Éditions Ipomée, albums, illustration.

Abstract:

Avec l’instauration de la Sécurité sociale et le remboursem*nt des cures par l’Assurance maladie, les stations thermales françaises sont, au sortir de la Seconde Guerre mondiale, consacrées comme des territoires d’accompagnement des pathologies et affections qui marquent l’avancée en âge. Intervient néanmoins, au cours des années 1990, une remise en cause par les pouvoirs publics du service médical rendu par les soins thermaux. Cette menace précipite la mobilisation des acteurs du thermalisme pour défendre les intérêts de la filière auprès de l’État. Organisés nationalement, ils cherchent alors à rappeler leur légitimité et leur savoir-faire dans la prise en charge du vieillissem*nt pathologique. Mais ils se saisissent également du paradigme du « bien vieillir » et du « vieillissem*nt actif », voyant là une opportunité de croissance pour relancer une activité par ailleurs fragilisée par la chute de fréquentation des établissem*nts thermaux. Située en Normandie, la station de Bagnoles de l’Orne constitue un cas d’étude pour observer, au niveau local, la recomposition du thermalisme. Accompagnée et orientée par les élus dans un souci d’attractivité territoriale, la modernisation de l’offre thermale bouleverse des équilibres anciens. Ainsi deux vieillesses tendent-elles désormais à cohabiter sur ce territoire. Cherchant à adapter la cure aux enjeux récents de santé publique, les professionnels du thermalisme entendent continuer à accueillir des patients âgés et malades. S’est toutefois développée une seconde approche du vieillissem*nt. Centrée sur la prévention, l’activité physique et le bien-être à destination d’un public bien portant et solvable, elle s’accorde avec la montée des injonctions au vieillissem*nt réussi.

Abstract:

The purpose of this article is to analyze the so-called human capital theory and to clarify the concept of public good, as well as the frequency of the expression "public" in the Declarations adopted at the Regional Conferences of Higher Education in Latin America and the Caribbean in 2008 and 2018. For this, in methodological terms, this article analyzes documents from certain International Organizations (UNESCO, World Bank and OECD) and seeks theoretical support in Reinhart Koselleck's History of Concepts and other authors such as Roger Dale, Susan Robertson, Bob Jessop, Stephen Gill, Paul Samuelson , Karl Polanyi and Pierre Bourdieu.ResumoO presente artigo tem o objetivo de analisar a chamada teoria do capital humano e precisar o conceito de bem público, bem como a frequência da expressão “público” nas Declarações aprovadas nas Conferências Regionais de Educação Superior na América Latina e Caribe, em 2008 e 2018. Para isto, em termos metodológicos, o presente artigo analisa documentos de determinadas Organizações Internacionais (UNESCO, Banco Mundial e OCDE) e busca apoio na História dos Conceitos de Reinhart Koselleck e em autores como Roger Dale, Bob Jessop, Stephen Gill, Paul Samuelson, Karl Polanyi, Pierre Bourdieu.Keywords: Public good, Human capital theory, Commodification, Education, CRES 2008 and CRES 2018.Palavras-chave: Bem público, Teoria do capital humano, Mercadorização, Educação, CRES 2008 e CRES 2018.ReferencesALVES, Giovanni. O que é o precariado? Blog da Boitempo. Extraído de <https://blogdaboitempo.com.br/2013/07/22/o-que-e-o-precariado/>, 22 Jul 2013, acesso em 28 fev 2019.ARENDT, Hannah. A crise na educação. In: Entre o passado e o futuro. Tradução: Mauro W. Barbosa de Almeida. 3ª reimpressão da 5ª ed. de 2000. São Paulo: Perspectiva, 2005.AUDITORIA CIDADÃ DA DÍVIDA. Dividômetro: quanto pagamos (juros e amortizações) – dívida pública federal. Auditoria Cidadã da Dívída. 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Abstract:

Un constat fort se dégage des enquêtes sur les connaissances des élèves en math, en sciences et en lecture opérées depuis 30 ans par l’OCDE : la performance de notre enseignement décroche graduellement par rapport à celle des pays voisins et de la Flandre. Quels sont les déterminants probables d’un tel état de fait ? Peut-on penser que le niveau des ressources joue un rôle décisif ? A vrai dire non. Communautés française et flamande ont dépensé tout au long des années 1990 pratiquement le même montant par élève. Mais les scores des élèves en Flandre sont nettement supérieurs. Nos travaux et ceux de nombreux collègues économistes de l’éducation suggèrent que l’enjeu est avant tout organisationnel. Certes, les ressources budgétaires importent. Il est évident, par exemple, que leur niveau doit garantir la possibilité d’engager du personnel en nombre et qualité suffisants. Mais la majoration des moyens financiers et humains ne constitue nullement une condition suffisante de l’amélioration des performances. Dans l’enseignement plus que dans d’autres secteurs, le mode d’organisation (régulation) semble, en revanche, avoir une forte influence sur la relation ressources/résultats. Que peut-on dire de la situation en Communauté française sur ce plan et quels en sont les enjeux ? En bref, nous pouvons dire que le mode de régulation actuel est très insatisfaisant car très hybride. Il repose sur plusieurs conceptions de la régulation. Chacune comporte des faiblesses. De plus, l’articulation qui s’est opérée au fil des ans a été peu réfléchie, mal mise en oeuvre, et se révèle en définitive coûteuse sur le plan des performances. A l’inverse, la Flandre a accompli depuis 1970 un travail discret mais bien effectif de simplification et de clarification de son mode de régulation. L'organisation de l'enseignement en Communauté française comporte tout d'abord une composante concurrentielle (ou "quasi-marché"). Bien que le financement de l’enseignement soit public, les modalités d’octroi de ce financement font apparaître une logique concurrentielle : les parents, les élèves ou étudiants sont en effet libres de choisir leur établissem*nt. Les établissem*nts sont de surcroît financés en fonction du nombre d’inscrits. La faiblesse de ce modèle est qu’il est source d’iniquité, dans la mesure où le libre-choix tend généralement à accentuer le degré de ségrégation des publics entre écoles proches. Il y a par ailleurs en Communauté française une tradition de contrôle par la voie hiérarchique. Les réglementations administratives sont nombreuses dans l’enseignement : horaires, grilles salariales, taux d’encadrement, priorité d’emploi pour les personnels avec ancienneté, ... Et la tendance récente est à l’amplification. Or, l’évaluation que les économistes font sur ce type d’interventions est très mitigée. Le contrôle administratif réussit certes à générer une certaine conformité (respect formel des horaires, des taux d’encadrement prévus par la loi, …) mais il échoue à influencer les comportements des enseignants qui déterminent réellement le degré d’efficacité et d’équité du système. La présence simultanée de ces deux modes de régulation antagonistes nuit tant à l'efficacité qu'à l'équité de l'enseignement. La concurrence, pour être efficace, requiert la présence de producteurs libres de choisir l’usage des ressources qui leur paraît le plus indiqué pour répondre à la demande. Or, le contrôle administratif limite fortement l'autonomie des écoles en multipliant règles et procédures à respecter. On peut également douter du fait que le contrôle administratif exerce une action correctrice par rapport aux effets néfastes du libre-choix. Ainsi, peu de mesures administratives en vigueur sont de nature à limiter la ségrégation des publics ou ses effets. L’uniformité des salaires et des modes de gestion du personnel empêche, par exemple, l’octroi de primes salariales aux enseignants s’occupant d’élèves en difficulté. Que faire dès lors ? En dépit de toutes les limitations d'un système de libre-choix, et malgré la tendance à la ségrégation des publics qui la caractérise, nous ne croyons pas à son remplacement par un modèle hiérarchique pur, avec, comme en France, une carte scolaire synonyme d’assignation de l’école en fonction du lieu de résidence. Car il y a la question du coût politique de l’abandon du libre-choix de l’école. Mais il y a aussi le risque d’une accentuation de la ségrégation résidentielle. L’option de politique scolaire doit plutôt être celle d'encadrer le système de libre-choix, mais pas via un renforcement du contrôle hiérarchique de type bureaucratique. Il est plus indiqué d’opter, comme en Flandre mais aussi en Finlande ou en Grande-Bretagne, pour un encadrement par voie de contractualisation. Il s’agirait de dissocier plus nettement qu’aujourd’hui les fonctions de contrôle et de production du service éducatif. Aux écoles, il reviendrait de décider plus librement des horaires de présence des professeurs et des élèves, de la durée des cours par matière, du nombre et du type d’enseignants à recruter ou encore de l’opportunité de les envoyer en recyclage. A l’administration, il appartiendrait d’évaluer la performance des écoles. Son rôle principal deviendrait de faire passer aux élèves, à intervalles réguliers, des tests standardisés, à l’image de ceux conçus par l’OCDE. Les résultats à ces tests, pondérés pour tenir compte de l’origine socio-économique des élèves, formeraient la base de l’évaluation des écoles. Et ce n’est qu’en cas d’évaluation négative répétée qu’il y aurait intervention dans la gestion de l’école, par un changement de direction, une mise sous tutelle, …

Abstract:

Un constat fort se dégage des enquêtes sur les connaissances des élèves en math, en sciences et en lecture opérées depuis 30 ans par l’OCDE : la performance de notre enseignement décroche graduellement par rapport à celle des pays voisins et de la Flandre. Quels sont les déterminants probables d’un tel état de fait ? Peut-on penser que le niveau des ressources joue un rôle décisif ? A vrai dire non. Communautés française et flamande ont dépensé tout au long des années 1990 pratiquement le même montant par élève. Mais les scores des élèves en Flandre sont nettement supérieurs. Nos travaux et ceux de nombreux collègues économistes de l’éducation suggèrent que l’enjeu est avant tout organisationnel. Certes, les ressources budgétaires importent. Il est évident, par exemple, que leur niveau doit garantir la possibilité d’engager du personnel en nombre et qualité suffisants. Mais la majoration des moyens financiers et humains ne constitue nullement une condition suffisante de l’amélioration des performances. Dans l’enseignement plus que dans d’autres secteurs, le mode d’organisation (régulation) semble, en revanche, avoir une forte influence sur la relation ressources/résultats. Que peut-on dire de la situation en Communauté française sur ce plan et quels en sont les enjeux ? En bref, nous pouvons dire que le mode de régulation actuel est très insatisfaisant car très hybride. Il repose sur plusieurs conceptions de la régulation. Chacune comporte des faiblesses. De plus, l’articulation qui s’est opérée au fil des ans a été peu réfléchie, mal mise en oeuvre, et se révèle en définitive coûteuse sur le plan des performances. A l’inverse, la Flandre a accompli depuis 1970 un travail discret mais bien effectif de simplification et de clarification de son mode de régulation. L'organisation de l'enseignement en Communauté française comporte tout d'abord une composante concurrentielle (ou "quasi-marché"). Bien que le financement de l’enseignement soit public, les modalités d’octroi de ce financement font apparaître une logique concurrentielle : les parents, les élèves ou étudiants sont en effet libres de choisir leur établissem*nt. Les établissem*nts sont de surcroît financés en fonction du nombre d’inscrits. La faiblesse de ce modèle est qu’il est source d’iniquité, dans la mesure où le libre-choix tend généralement à accentuer le degré de ségrégation des publics entre écoles proches. Il y a par ailleurs en Communauté française une tradition de contrôle par la voie hiérarchique. Les réglementations administratives sont nombreuses dans l’enseignement : horaires, grilles salariales, taux d’encadrement, priorité d’emploi pour les personnels avec ancienneté, ... Et la tendance récente est à l’amplification. Or, l’évaluation que les économistes font sur ce type d’interventions est très mitigée. Le contrôle administratif réussit certes à générer une certaine conformité (respect formel des horaires, des taux d’encadrement prévus par la loi, …) mais il échoue à influencer les comportements des enseignants qui déterminent réellement le degré d’efficacité et d’équité du système. La présence simultanée de ces deux modes de régulation antagonistes nuit tant à l'efficacité qu'à l'équité de l'enseignement. La concurrence, pour être efficace, requiert la présence de producteurs libres de choisir l’usage des ressources qui leur paraît le plus indiqué pour répondre à la demande. Or, le contrôle administratif limite fortement l'autonomie des écoles en multipliant règles et procédures à respecter. On peut également douter du fait que le contrôle administratif exerce une action correctrice par rapport aux effets néfastes du libre-choix. Ainsi, peu de mesures administratives en vigueur sont de nature à limiter la ségrégation des publics ou ses effets. L’uniformité des salaires et des modes de gestion du personnel empêche, par exemple, l’octroi de primes salariales aux enseignants s’occupant d’élèves en difficulté. Que faire dès lors ? En dépit de toutes les limitations d'un système de libre-choix, et malgré la tendance à la ségrégation des publics qui la caractérise, nous ne croyons pas à son remplacement par un modèle hiérarchique pur, avec, comme en France, une carte scolaire synonyme d’assignation de l’école en fonction du lieu de résidence. Car il y a la question du coût politique de l’abandon du libre-choix de l’école. Mais il y a aussi le risque d’une accentuation de la ségrégation résidentielle. L’option de politique scolaire doit plutôt être celle d'encadrer le système de libre-choix, mais pas via un renforcement du contrôle hiérarchique de type bureaucratique. Il est plus indiqué d’opter, comme en Flandre mais aussi en Finlande ou en Grande-Bretagne, pour un encadrement par voie de contractualisation. Il s’agirait de dissocier plus nettement qu’aujourd’hui les fonctions de contrôle et de production du service éducatif. Aux écoles, il reviendrait de décider plus librement des horaires de présence des professeurs et des élèves, de la durée des cours par matière, du nombre et du type d’enseignants à recruter ou encore de l’opportunité de les envoyer en recyclage. A l’administration, il appartiendrait d’évaluer la performance des écoles. Son rôle principal deviendrait de faire passer aux élèves, à intervalles réguliers, des tests standardisés, à l’image de ceux conçus par l’OCDE. Les résultats à ces tests, pondérés pour tenir compte de l’origine socio-économique des élèves, formeraient la base de l’évaluation des écoles. Et ce n’est qu’en cas d’évaluation négative répétée qu’il y aurait intervention dans la gestion de l’école, par un changement de direction, une mise sous tutelle, …

Abstract:

L’hétérosexisme réfère à l’ensemble des croyances qui valorisent et promeuvent l’hétérosexualité tout en infériorisant les sexualités non hétérosexuelles. Ainsi, l’hétérosexualité apparaît comme la sexualité universelle, allant de soi, naturelle, normale, morale, bref elle est dotée d’une valeur supérieure en référence à des systèmes normatifs religieux, scientifiques, juridiques ou autres, alors que l’hom*osexualité (ou toute sexualité s’écartant de la norme hétérosexuelle) se voit dépréciée en tant que crime, péché, acte sexuel non naturel, pathologie, déviance sexuelle, etc. Le concept d’hétérosexisme apparaît aux États-Unis au début des années 1970, en même temps que celui d’hom*ophobie (Herek, 2004). Tout en contestant les savoirs institutionnels de l’époque, ces deux termes proposent néanmoins des voies distinctes de conceptualisation de l’oppression des personnes hom*osexuelles. L’hom*ophobie inverse le paradigme psychomédical dominant en pathologisant non plus l’hom*osexualité, mais la peur irrationnelle qu’en ont certains individus. L’hétérosexisme enracine cette oppression dans le social, par analogie avec d’autres systèmes de croyances qui différencient et hiérarchisent des catégories de personnes, comme le racisme et le sexisme (Herek, 2000). Le premier terme emprunte à la psychanalyse alors que le second provient d’une pensée d’inspiration féministe, antiraciste et anticapitaliste. Les deux concepts se diffuseront largement au sein des mouvements de libération des gays et des lesbiennes, puis dans l’univers académique, d’abord dans le monde anglo-saxon et plus tardivement en France (Tin, 2003). À l’origine, le concept d’hétérosexisme s’inscrivait dans des perspectives lesbiennes-féministes. Il s’articulait avec diverses analyses critiques de la place de l’hétérosexualité institutionnalisée dans les processus de subordination des femmes par les hommes (Dugan, 2000). Dans un tel paradigme, l’hétérosexisme fait partie du système patriarcal qui assujettit les femmes, notamment en justifiant leur infériorisation au nom de la différence soi-disant naturelle entre les sexes/genres et de la complémentarité qui en découlerait nécessairement. Sur le plan politique, la notion appelle à une remise en question des constructions socioculturelles de la masculinité et de la féminité et des institutions qui maintiennent des rôles rigides de genre (Herek, 2004). En somme, la régulation des sexualités y est indissociable du maintien des rapports de domination des hommes sur les femmes. Dans cette optique, l’hétérosexisme est envisagé comme un système d’oppression étroitement relié à d’autres inégalités systémiques, comme le sexisme, le racisme ou le classisme (Wilton, 1995). Cependant, dans les usages récents du concept, les références aux théories issues du lesbianisme-féministe ou à l’intersectionnalité des luttes sociales sont le plus souvent absentes. Au fil des décennies, les définitions de l’hétérosexisme se sont multipliées tout en reprenant l’idée essentielle d’un processus systémique de différenciation et de hiérarchisation des sexualités hétérosexuelle et hom*osexuelle. Selon une recension de Smith, Oades et McCarthy (2012), certaines mettent l’insistance sur la normalisation de l’hétérosexualité et la promotion d’un style de vie hétérosexuel, d’autres sur la disqualification et l’occultation des autres sexualités. Dans cette dernière lignée, l’une des plus courantes est celle du psychologue Gregory Herek (2004) : « une idéologie culturelle qui perpétue la stigmatisation sexuelle en déniant et en dénigrant toute forme non hétérosexuelle de comportement, d’identité, de relation et de communauté non hétérosexuelle » (p. 16, traduction libre). Dans son opérationnalisation, le concept d’hétérosexisme se déploie tantôt vers le social, tantôt vers l’individuel, ce qui n’est pas sans générer des tensions théoriques. Dans le premier cas, la description des manifestations de l’hétérosexisme illustre son ancrage social et culturel, qu’il s’agisse de la présomption d’une hétérosexualité universelle dans les politiques et les pratiques des diverses institutions (écoles, services publics, entreprises, etc.), de l’idéalisation de l’amour hétérosexuel dans les représentations (films, romans, etc.), de l’injonction au silence ou à la discrétion adressée aux gays et aux lesbiennes sous prétexte que la sexualité relève de la vie privée, ou encore de l’assimilation de leurs expériences diverses au modèle dominant de conjugalité hétérosexuelle (Fish, 2006). Sans qu’il n’y ait de consensus sur une perspective théorique commune, les explications de l’hétérosexisme attirent l’attention sur les mécanismes structurels qui en assurent la reproduction, comme le langage et le droit. Dans cette veine, Neisen (1990) définit l’hétérosexisme en associant les notions de préjugés et de pouvoir, ce dernier s’exerçant notamment dans les sphères étatique (criminalisation des relations hom*osexuelles) et scientifique (discours pathologisants). Dans le second cas, l’accent sera mis sur les effets individuels de l’hétérosexisme en matière de statut et d’inégalités sociales. Ainsi l’hétérosexisme est souvent vu comme la source ou le fondement des attitudes et des comportements hom*ophobes envers les personnes non hétérosexuelles ou perçues comme telles. Par exemple, Pharr (1997) voit dans l’hétérosexisme le pendant institutionnel de l’hom*ophobie : le déploiement systématique de l’idéologie hétérosexiste sur le plan culturel et les gestes hom*ophobes dans les interactions sociales se renforcent mutuellement pour maintenir le pouvoir et les privilèges associés à l’hétérosexualité. Sous cet angle, et malgré leurs racines distinctes sur les plans épistémologique et politique, les concepts d’hétérosexisme et d’hom*ophobie ont souvent été jumelés et présentés comme des notions complémentaires l’une à l’autre, l’un agissant au niveau social, comme une idéologie inégalitaire des sexualités, et l’autre au niveau individuel ou psychologique. Pour sa part, Borrillo (2000) relève l’impossibilité de déconnecter les deux termes puisque l’hom*ophobie ne peut se comprendre indépendamment de la reproduction de l’ordre social des sexes (sexisme) et des sexualités (hétérosexisme). Phénomène à la fois cognitif et normatif, l’hétérosexisme renvoie à « l’ensemble des discours, des pratiques, des procédures et des institutions qui en problématisant ainsi la “spécificité hom*osexuelle”, ne cessent de renforcer un dispositif destiné à organiser les individus en tant qu’être sexués. » (p. 24). Cependant, les deux notions sont parfois vues comme plus ou moins interchangeables et positionnées comme des concurrentes parmi lesquelles il faut choisir. Une première dissension surgit alors à propos des manifestations d’ostracisme que les deux termes permettent de capter. Au concept d’hom*ophobie, il est reproché d’être androcentrique (centré sur les agressions subies par les hommes gays) et de se focaliser sur les gestes extrêmes d’un continuum de rejet de l’hom*osexualité, ce qui ne permet pas de rendre compte de leur vaste éventail, ni de leurs formes institutionnelles (Herek, 2004). L’hétérosexisme est considéré comme une notion plus adéquate pour couvrir l’ensemble des manifestations qui reconduisent les inégalités entre les sexualités, y compris les plus subtiles et celles qui s’insinuent dans la banalité du quotidien et que l’on pourrait assimiler au sexisme ordinaire. De même, comparativement aux mesures d’attitudes hom*ophobes, axées sur le rejet, les mesures d’attitudes hétérosexistes, comme l’échelle d’hétérosexisme moderne (Walls, 2008), seraient plus aptes à saisir la persistance des stéréotypes (négatifs mais aussi positifs) envers les personnes gays, lesbiennes ou bisexuelles, même chez les individus exprimant des dispositions favorables à leur égard. Autrement dit, la référence à l’hétérosexisme permet d’enregistrer les changements sociétaux positifs tout en révélant la persistance de la hiérarchie des orientations sexuelles. Toutefois, ce concept sera critiqué en retour comme opérant une dilution ou une euphémisation de l’hostilité généralisée envers les personnes et les sexualités non hétérosexuelles qui en occulterait les démonstrations les plus brutales. Le second axe de tension renvoie aux explications, tantôt psychologiques, tantôt sociologiques, de la stigmatisation des personnes non hétérosexuelles. Le concept d’hom*ophobie a maintes fois été critiqué pour son réductionnisme psychologique (Chamberland et Lebreton, 2012 ; Herek 2004). De même, lorsque le seul usage de l’hétérosexisme est l’application à une mesure d’attitude individuelle, il lui sera reproché d’escamoter toute analyse structurelle et de réduire ainsi la portée analytique du concept. Les implications du choix de l’un ou l’autre concept sont à la fois théoriques et politiques. Plusieurs auteur·e·s optent pour le concept d’hétérosexisme, car il engage à se pencher sur les rapports sociaux et les structures qui reproduisent les inégalités sexuelles. Il s’agit de s’éloigner des schèmes d’explication psychologique ayant la cote dans les sociétés libérales et des solutions uniquement centrées sur l’intervention auprès des individus (sensibilisation, formation, etc.) pour envisager des transformations sociales globales ou à tout le moins des mesures s’attaquant à la hiérarchie des sexualités dans l’organisation des diverses sphères de vie (famille, école, travail, etc.) (Herek, 2004 ; Wilton, 1995). Dans un récent effort de synthèse, Rumens (2016) propose de distinguer l’hétérosexisme culturel, qui réfère à la dimension institutionnelle, et l’hétérosexisme individuel. Avec la montée du post-structuralisme, le concept d’hétérosexisme connaît un certain désaveu, au même titre que d’autres notions faisant référence à toute structure sociale. Son emploi décline au profit du concept d’hétéronormativité créé par Michael Warner (1993), qui met en lumière la normativité langagière et discursive opérant à travers la construction des catégories binaires (des corps, des sexes, des genres, des désirs, etc.) qui composent la matrice de l’hétérosexualité (Herek, 2004). Dans le champ interdisciplinaire des études sur la sexualité, l’hétérosexisme demeure un concept central pour analyser la stratification sexuelle et les inégalités sociales qui en découlent. Bien que le concept se prête à plusieurs définitions, son potentiel heuristique est maximisé lorsqu’il se conjugue à des cadres théoriques et analytiques susceptibles de rendre compte de l’inscription d’une idéologie qui privilégie systématiquement l’hétérosexualité dans les institutions, dans les pratiques sociales et culturelles et dans les interactions quotidiennes, exerçant ainsi une contrainte à l’hétérosexualité (Fish, 2006).

Abstract:

“There is nothing more public than privacy.” (Berlant and Warner, Sex) How did it come to this? How did it happen that a one-off, two-hour event at a public swimming pool in a suburb of outer Melbourne ignited international hate mail and generated media-fanned political anguish and debate about the proper use of public spaces? In 2010, women who attend a women’s only swim session on Sunday evenings at the Dandenong Oasis public swimming pool asked the pool management and the local council for permission to celebrate the end of Ramadan at the pool during the time of their regular swim session. The request was supported by the pool managers and the council and promoted by both as an opportunity for family and friends to get together in a spirit of multicultural learning and understanding. Responding to criticisms of the event as an unreasonable claim on public facilities by one group, the Mayor of the City of Greater Dandenong, Jim Memeti, rejected claims that this event discriminates against non-Muslim residents of the suburb. But here’s the rub. The event, to be held after hours at the pool, requires all participants older than ten years of age to follow a dress code of knee-length shorts and T-shirts. This is a suburban moment that is borne of but exceeds the local. It reflects and responds to a contemporary global conundrum of great political and theoretical significance—how to negotiate and govern the relations between multiculturalism, religion, gender, sexual freedom, and democracy. Specifically this event speaks to how multicultural democracy in the public sphere negotiates the public presence and expression of different cultural and religious frameworks related to gender and sexuality. This is demanding political stuff. Situated in the messy political and theoretical terrains of the relation between public space and the public sphere, this local moment called for political judgement about how cultural differences should be allowed to manifest in and through public space, giving consideration to the potential effects of these decisions on an inclusive multicultural democracy. The local authorities in Dandenong engaged in an admirable process of democratic labour as they puzzled over how to make decisions that were responsible and equitable, in the absence of a rulebook or precedents for success. Ultimately however this mode of experimental decision-making, which will become increasingly necessary to manage such predicaments in the future, was foreclosed by unwarranted and unhelpful media outrage. "Foreclosed" here stresses the preemptive nature of the loss; a lost opportunity for trialing approaches to governing cultural diversity that may fail, but might then be modified. It was condemned in advance of either success or failure. The role of the media rather than the discomfort of the local publics has been decisive in this event.This Multicultural SuburbDandenong is approximately 30 kilometres southeast of central Melbourne. Originally home to the Bunorong People of the Kulin nation, it was settled by pastoralists by the 1800s, heavily industrialised during the twentieth century, and now combines cultural diversity with significant social disadvantage. The City of Greater Dandenong is proud of its reputation as the most culturally and linguistically diverse municipality in Australia. Its population of approximately 138,000 comprises residents from 156 different language groups. More than half (56%) of its population was born overseas, with 51% from nations where English is not the main spoken language. These include Vietnam, Cambodia, Sri Lanka, India, China, Italy, Greece, Bosnia and Afghanistan. It is also a place of significant religious diversity with residents identifying as Buddhist (15 per cent) Muslim (8 per cent), Hindu (2 per cent) and Christian (52 per cent) [CGD]. Its city logo, “Great Place, Great People” evokes its twin pride in the placemaking power of its diverse population. It is also a brazen act of civic branding to counter its reputation as a derelict and dangerous suburb. In his recent book The Bogan Delusion, David Nichols cites a "bogan" website that names Dandenong as one of Victoria’s two most bogan areas. The other was Moe. (p72). The Sunday Age newspaper had already depicted Dandenong as one of two excessively dangerous suburbs “where locals fear to tread” (Elder and Pierik). The other suburb of peril was identified as Footscray.Central Dandenong is currently the site of Australia’s largest ever state sponsored Urban Revitalisation program with a budget of more than $290 million to upgrade infrastructure, that aims to attract $1billion in private investment to provide housing and future employment.The Cover UpIn September 2010, the Victorian and Civil and Administrative Appeals Tribunal (VCAT) granted the YMCA an exemption from the Equal Opportunity Act to allow a dress code for the Ramadan event at the Oasis swimming pool that it manages. The "Y" sees the event as “an opportunity for the broader community to learn more about Ramadan and the Muslim faith, and encourages all members of Dandenong’s diverse community to participate” (YMCA Ramadan). While pool management and the municipal council refer to the event as an "opening up" of the closed swimming session, the media offer a different reading of the VCAT decision. The trope of the "the cover up" has framed most reports and commentaries (Murphy; Szego). The major focus of the commentaries has not been the event per se, but the call to dress "appropriately." Dress codes however are a cultural familiar. They exist for workplaces, schools, nightclubs, weddings, racing and sporting clubs and restaurants, to name but a few. While some of these codes or restrictions are normatively imposed rather than legally required, they are not alien to cultural life in Australia. Moreover, there are laws that prohibit people from being meagerly dressed or naked in public, including at beaches, swimming pools and so on. The dress code for this particular swimming pool event was, however, perceived to be unusual and, in a short space of time, "unusual" converted to "social threat."Responses to media polls about the dress code reveal concerns related to the symbolic dimensions of the code. The vast majority of those who opposed the Equal Opportunity exemption saw it as the thin edge of the multicultural wedge, a privatisation of public facilities, or a denial of the public’s right to choose how to dress. Tabloid newspapers reported on growing fears of Islamisation, while the more temperate opposition situated the decision as a crisis of human rights associated with tolerating illiberal cultural practices. Julie Szego reflects this view in an opinion piece in The Age newspaper:the Dandenong pool episode is neither trivial nor insignificant. It is but one example of human rights laws producing outcomes that restrict rights. It raises tough questions about how far public authorities ought to go in accommodating cultural practices that sit uneasily with mainstream Western values. (Szego)Without enquiring into the women’s request and in the absence of the women’s views about what meaning the event held for them, most media commentators and their electronically wired audiences treated the announcement as yet another alarming piece of evidence of multicultural failure and the potential Islamisation of Australia. The event raised specific concerns about the double intrusion of cultural difference and religion. While the Murdoch tabloid Herald Sun focused on the event as “a plan to force families to cover up to avoid offending Muslims at a public event” (Murphy) the liberal Age newspaper took a more circ*mspect approach, reporting on its small vox pop at the Dandenong pool. Some people here referred to the need to respect religions and seemed unfazed by the exemption and the event. Those who disagreed thought it was important not to enforce these (dress) practices on other people (Carey).It is, I believe, significant that several employees of the local council informed me that most of the opposition has come from the media, people outside of Dandenong and international groups who oppose the incursion of Islam into non-Islamic settings. Opposition to the event did not appear to derive from local concern or opposition.The overwhelming majority of Herald Sun comments expressed emphatic opposition to the dress code, citing it variously as unAustralian, segregationist, arrogant, intolerant and sexist. The Herald Sun polled readers (in a self-selecting and of course highly unrepresentative on-line poll) asking them to vote on whether or not they agreed with the VCAT exemption. While 5.52 per cent (512 voters) agreed with the ruling, 94.48 per cent (8,760) recorded disagreement. In addition, the local council has, for the first time in memory, received a stream of hate-mail from international anti-Islam groups. Muslim women’s groups, feminists, the Equal Opportunity Commissioner and academics have also weighed in. According to local reports, Professor of Islamic Studies at the University of Melbourne, Shahram Akbarzadeh, considered the exemption was “nonsense” and would “backfire and the people who will pay for it will be the Muslim community themselves” (Haberfield). He repudiated it as an example of inclusion and tolerance, labeling it “an effort of imposing a value system (sic)” (Haberfield). He went so far as to suggest that, “If Tony Abbott wanted to participate in his swimwear he wouldn’t be allowed in. That’s wrong.” Tasneem Chopra, chairwoman of the Islamic Women’s Welfare Council and Sherene Hassan from the Islamic Council of Victoria, both expressed sensitivity to the group’s attempt to establish an inclusive event but would have preferred the dress code to be a matter of choice rather coercion (Haberfield, "Mayor Defends Dandenong Pool Cover Up Order"). Helen Szoke, the Commissioner of the Victorian Equal Opportunity and Human Rights Commission, defended the pool’s exemption from the Law that she oversees. “Matters such as this are not easy to resolve and require a balance to be achieved between competing rights and obligations. Dress codes are not uncommon: e.g., singlets, jeans, thongs etc in pubs/hotels” (in Murphy). The civil liberties organisation, Liberty Victoria, supported the ban because the event was to be held after hours (Murphy). With astonishing speed this single event not only transformed the suburban swimming pool to a theatre of extra-local disputes about who and what is entitled to make claims on public space and publically funded facilities, but also fed into charged debates about the future of multiculturalism and the vulnerability of the nation to the corrosive effects of cultural and religious difference. In this sense suburbs like Dandenong are presented as sites that not only generate fear about physical safety but whose suburban sensitivities to its culturally diverse population represent a threat to the safety of the nation. Thus the event both reflects and produces an antipathy to cultural difference and to the place where difference resides. This aversion is triggered by and mediated in this case through the figure, rather than the (corpo)reality, of the Muslim woman. In this imagining, the figure of the Muslim woman is assigned the curious symbolic role of "cultural creep." The debates around the pool event is not about the wellbeing or interests of the Muslim women themselves, nor are broader debates about the perceived, culturally-derived restrictions imposed on Muslim women living in Australia or other western countries. The figure of the Muslim woman is, I would argue, simply the ground on which the debates are held. The first debate relates to social and public space, access to which is considered fundamental to freedom and participatory democracy, and in current times is addressed in terms of promoting inclusion, preventing exclusion and finding opportunities for cross cultural encounters. The second relates not to public space per se, but to the public sphere or the “sphere of private people coming together as a public” for political deliberation (Habermas 21). The literature and discussions dealing with these two terrains have remained relatively disconnected (Low and Smith) with public space referring largely to activities and opportunities in the socio-cultural domain and the public sphere addressing issues of politics, rights and democracy. This moment in Dandenong offers some modest leeway for situating "the suburb" as an ideal site for coalescing these disparate discussions. In this regard I consider Iveson’s provocative and productive question about whether some forms of exclusions from suburban public space may actually deepen the democratic ideals of the public sphere. Exclusions may in such cases be “consistent with visions of a democratically inclusive city” (216). He makes his case in relation to a dispute about the exclusion of men exclusion from a women’s only swimming pool in the Sydney suburb of Coogee. The Dandenong case is similarly exclusive with an added sense of exclusion generated by an "inclusion with restrictions."Diversity, Difference, Public Space and the Public SphereAs a prelude to this discussion of exclusion as democracy, I return to the question that opened this article: how did it come to this? How is it that Australia has moved from its renowned celebration and pride in its multiculturalism so much in evidence at the suburban level through what Ghassan Hage calls an “unproblematic” multiculturalism (233) and what others have termed “everyday multiculturalism” (Wise and Velayutham). Local cosmopolitanisms are often evinced through the daily rituals of people enjoying the ethnic cuisines of their co-residents’ pasts, and via moments of intercultural encounter. People uneventfully rub up against and greet each other or engage in everyday acts of kindness that typify life in multicultural suburbs, generating "reservoirs of hope" for democratic and cosmopolitan cities (Thrift 147). In today’s suburbs, however, the “Imperilled Muslim women” who need protection from “dangerous Muslim men” (Razack 129) have a higher discursive profile than ethnic cuisine as the exemplar of multiculturalism. Have we moved from pleasure to hostility or was the suburban pleasure in racial difference always about a kind of “eating the other” (bell hooks 378). That is to ask whether our capacity to experience diversity positively has been based on consumption, consuming the other for our own enrichment, whereas living with difference entails a commitment not to consumption but to democracy. This democratic multicultural commitment is a form of labour rather than pleasure, and its outcome is not enrichment but transformation (although this labour can be pleasurable and transformation might be enriching). Dandenong’s prized cultural precincts, "Little India" and the "Afghan bazaar" are showcases of food, artefacts and the diversity of the suburb. They are centres of pleasurable and exotic consumption. The pool session, however, requires one to confront difference. In simple terms we can think about ethnic food, festivals and handicrafts as cultural diversity, and the Muslim woman as cultural difference.This distinction between diversity and difference is useful for thinking through the relation between multiculturalism in public space and multicultural democracy of the public sphere. According to the anthropologist Thomas Hylland Eriksen, while a neoliberal sensibility supports cultural diversity in the public space, cultural difference is seen as a major cause of social problems associated with immigrants, and has a diminishing effect on the public sphere (14). According to Eriksen, diversity is understood as aesthetic, or politically and morally neutral expressions of culture that are enriching (Hage 118) or digestible. Difference, however, refers to morally objectionable cultural practices. In short, diversity is enriching. Difference is corrosive. Eriksen argues that differences that emerge from distinct cultural ideas and practices are deemed to create conflicts with majority cultures, weaken social solidarity and lead to unacceptable violations of human rights in minority groups. The suburban swimming pool exists here at the boundary of diversity and difference, where the "presence" of diverse bodies may enrich, but their different practices deplete and damage existing culture. The imperilled Muslim woman of the suburbs carries a heavy symbolic load. She stands for major global contests at the border of difference and diversity in three significant domains, multiculturalism, religion and feminism. These three areas are positioned simultaneously in public space and of the public sphere and she embodies a specific version of each in this suburban setting. First, there a global retreat from multiculturalism evidenced in contemporary narratives that describe multiculturalism (both as official policy and unofficial sensibility) as failed and increasingly ineffective at accommodating or otherwise dealing with religious, cultural and ethnic differences (Cantle; Goodhart; Joppke; Poynting and Mason). In the UK, Europe, the US and Australia, popular media sources and political discourses speak of "parallel lives,"immigrant enclaves, ghettoes, a lack of integration, the clash of values, and illiberal cultural practices. The covered body of the Muslim woman, and more particularly the Muslim veil, are now read as visual signs of this clash of values and of the refusal to integrate. Second, religion has re-emerged in the public domain, with religious groups and individuals making particular claims on public space both on the basis of their religious identity and in accord with secular society’s respect for religious freedom. This is most evident in controversies in France, Belgium and Netherlands associated with banning niqab in public and other religious symbols in schools, and in Australia in court. In this sense the covered Muslim woman raises concerns and indignation about the rightful place of religion in the public sphere and in social space. Third, feminism is increasingly invoked as the ground from which claims about the imperilled Muslim woman are made, particularly those about protecting women from their dangerous men. The infiltration of the Muslim presence into public space is seen as a threat to the hard won gains of women’s freedom enjoyed by the majority population. This newfound feminism of the public sphere, posited by those who might otherwise disavow feminism, requires some serious consideration. This public discourse rarely addresses the discrimination, violation and lack of freedom experienced systematically on an everyday basis by women of majority cultural backgrounds in western societies (such as Australia). However, the sexism of racially and religiously different men is readily identified and decried. This represents a significant shift to a dubious feminist register of the public sphere such that: “[w]omen of foreign origin, ...more specifically Muslim women…have replaced the traditional housewife as the symbol of female subservience” (Tissot 41–42).The three issues—multiculturalism, religion and feminism—are, in the Dandenong pool context, contests about human rights, democracy and the proper use of public space. Szego’s opinion piece sees the Dandenong pool "cover up" as an example of the conundrum of how human rights for some may curtail the human rights of others and lead us into a problematic entanglement of universal "rights," with claims of difference. In her view the combination of human rights and multiculturalism in the case of the Dandenong Pool accommodates illiberal practices that put the rights of "the general public" at risk, or as she puts it, on a “slippery slope” that results in a “watering down of our human rights.” Ideas that entail women making a claim for private time in public space are ultimately not good for "us."Such ideas run counter to the West's more than 500-year struggle for individual freedom—including both freedom of religion and freedom from religion—and for gender equality. Our public authorities ought to be pushing back hardest when these values are under threat. Yet this is precisely where they've been buckling under pressure (Szego)But a different reading of the relation between public and private space, human rights, democracy and gender freedom is readily identifiable in the Dandenong event—if one looks for it. Living with difference, I have already suggested, is a problem of democracy and the public sphere and does not so easily correspond to consuming diversity, as it demands engagement with cultural difference. In what remains, I explore how multicultural democracy in the public sphere and women’s rights in public and private realms relate, firstly, to the burgeoning promise of democracy and civility that might emerge in public space through encounter and exchange. I also point out how this moment in Dandenong might be read as a singular contribution to dealing with this global problematic of living with difference; of democracy in the public sphere. Public urban space has become a focus for speculation among geographers and sociologists in particular, about the prospects for an enhanced civic appreciation of living with difference through encountering strangers. Random and repetitious encounters with people from all cultures typify contemporary urban life. It remains an open question however as to whether these encounters open up or close down possibilities for conviviality and understanding, and whether they undo or harden peoples’ fears and prejudices. There is, however, at least in some academic and urban planning circles, some hope that the "throwntogetherness" (Massey) and the "doing" of togetherness (Laurier and Philo) found in the multicultural city may generate some lessons and opportunities for developing a civic culture and political commitment to living with difference. Alongside the optimism of those who celebrate the city, the suburb, and public spaces as forging new ways of living with difference, there are those such as Gill Valentine who wonder how this might be achieved in practice (324). Ash Amin similarly notes that city or suburban public spaces are not necessarily “the natural servants of multicultural engagement” (Ethnicity 967). Amin and Valentine point to the limited or fleeting opportunities for real engagement in these spaces. Moreover Valentine‘s research in the UK revealed that the spatial proximity found in multicultural spaces did not so much give rise to greater mutual respect and engagement, but to a frustrated “white self-segregation in the suburbs.” She suggests therefore that civility and polite exchange should not be mistaken for respect (324). Amin contends that it is the “micro-publics” of social encounters found in workplaces, schools, gardens, sports clubs [and perhaps swimming pools] rather than the fleeting encounters of the street or park, that offer better opportunities for meaningful intercultural exchange. The Ramadan celebration at the pool, with its dress code and all, might be seen more fruitfully as a purposeful event engaging a micro-public in which people are able to “break out of fixed relations and fixed notions” and “learn to become different” (Amin, Ethnicity 970) without that generating discord and resentment.Micropublics, Subaltern Publics and a Democracy of (Temporary) ExclusionsIs this as an opportunity to bring the global and local together in an experiment of forging new democratic spaces for gender, sexuality, culture and for living with difference? More provocatively, can we see exclusion and an invitation to share in this exclusion as a precursor to and measure of, actually existing democracy? Painter and Philo have argued that democratic citizenship is questionable if “people cannot be present in public spaces (streets, squares, parks, cinemas, churches, town halls) without feeling uncomfortable, victimized and basically ‘out of place’…" (Iveson 216). Feminists have long argued that distinctions between public and private space are neither straightforward nor gender neutral. For Nancy Fraser the terms are “cultural classifications and rhetorical labels” that are powerful because they are “frequently deployed to delegitimate some interests, views and topics and to valorize others” (73). In relation to women and other subordinated minorities, the "rhetoric of privacy" has been historically used to restrict the domain of legitimate public contestation. In fact the notion of what is public and particularly notions of the "public interest" and the "public good" solidify forms of subordination. Fraser suggests the concept of "subaltern counterpublics" as an alternative to notions of "the public." These are discursive spaces where groups articulate their needs, and demands are circulated formulating their own public sphere. This challenges the very meaning and foundational premises of ‘the public’ rather than simply positing strategies of inclusion or exclusion. The twinning of Amin’s notion of "micro-publics" and Fraser’s "counterpublics" is, I suggest, a fruitful approach to interpreting the Dandenong pool issue. It invites a reading of this singular suburban moment as an experiment, a trial of sorts, in newly imaginable ways of living democratically with difference. It enables us to imagine moments when a limited democratic right to exclude might create the sorts of cultural exchanges that give rise to a more authentic and workable recognition of cultural difference. I am drawn to think that this is precisely the kind of democratic experimentation that the YMCA and Dandenong Council embarked upon when they applied for the Equal Opportunity exemption. I suggest that by trialing, rather than fixing forever a "critically exclusive" access to the suburban swimming pool for two hours per year, they were in fact working on the practical problem of how to contribute in small but meaningful ways to a more profoundly free democracy and a reworked public sphere. In relation to the similar but distinct example of the McIver pool for women and children in Coogee, New South Wales, Kurt Iveson makes the point that such spaces of exclusion or withdrawal, “do not necessarily serve simply as spaces where people ‘can be themselves’, or as sites through which reified identities are recognised—in existing conditions of inequality, they can also serve as protected spaces where people can take the risk of exploring who they might become with relative safety from attack and abuse” (226). These are necessary risks to take if we are to avoid entrenching fear of difference in a world where difference is itself deeply, and permanently, entrenched.ReferencesAmin, Ash. “Ethnicity and the Multicultural City: Living with Diversity.” Environment and Planning A 34 (2002): 959–80.———. “The Good City.” Urban Studies 43 (2006): 1009–23.Berlant, Lauren, and Michael Warner. “Sex in Public.” Critical Inquiry 24 (1998): 547–66.Cantle, Ted. Community Cohesion: A Report of the Independent Review Team. London, UK Home Office, 2001.Carey, Adam. “Backing for Pool Cover Up Directive.” The Age 17 Sep. 2010. ‹http://www.theage.com.au/victoria/backing-for-pool-coverup-directive-20100916-15enz.html›.Elder, John, and Jon Pierick. “The Mean Streets: Where the Locals Fear to Tread.” The Sunday Age 10 Jan. 2010. ‹http://www.theage.com.au/national/the-mean-streets-where-the-locals-fear-to-tread-20100109-m00l.html?skin=text-only›.Eriksen, Thomas Hyland. “Diversity versus Difference: Neoliberalism in the Minority Debate." The Making and Unmaking of Difference. Ed. Richard Rottenburg, Burkhard Schnepel, and Shingo Shimada. Bielefeld: Transaction, 2006. 13–36.Fraser, Nancy. “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy.” Social Text 25/26 (1990): 56–80.Goodhart, David. “Too Diverse.” Prospect 95 (2004): 30-37.Haberfield, Georgie, and Gilbert Gardner. “Mayor Defends Pool Cover-up Order.” Dandenong Leader 16 Sep. 2010 ‹http://dandenong-leader.whereilive.com.au/news/story/dandenong-oasis-tells-swimmers-to-cover-up/›.Habermas, Jürgen. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 2001.Hage, Ghassan. White Nation: Fantasies of White Supremacy in a Multicultural Society. Sydney: Pluto, 1998.hooks, bell. "Eating the Other: Desire and Resistance." Media and Cultural Studies Keyworks. Eds. Meenakshi Gigi and Douglas Kellner. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2001. 366-380.Iveson, Kurt. "Justifying Exclusion: The Politics of Public Space and the Dispute over Access to McIvers Ladies' Baths, Sydney.” Gender, Place and Culture 10.3 (2003): 215–28.Joppke, Christian. “The Retreat of Multiculturalism in the Liberal State: Theory and Policy.” The British Journal of Sociology 55.2 (2004): 237–57.Laurier, Chris, and Eric Philo. “Cold Shoulders and Napkins Handed: Gestures of Responsibility.” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 31 (2006): 193–207.Low, Setha, and Neil Smith, eds. The Politics of Public Space. London: Routledge, 2006.Massey, Doreen. For Space. London: Sage, 2005.Murphy, Padraic. "Cover Up for Pool Even at Next Year's Ramadan.” Herald Sun 23 Sep. 2010. ‹http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/victoria/cover-up-for-pool-event-during-next-years-ramadan/story-e6frf7kx-1225924291675›.Nichols, David. The Bogan Delusion. Melbourne: Affirm Press, 2011.Poynting, Scott, and Victoria Mason. "The New Integrationism, the State and Islamophobia: Retreat from Multiculturalism in Australia." International Journal of Law, Crime and Justice 36 (2008): 230–46.Razack, Sherene H. “Imperilled Muslim Women, Dangerous Muslim Men and Civilised Europeans: Legal and Social Responses to Forced Marriages.” Feminist Legal Studies 12.2 (2004): 129–74.Szego, Julie. “Under the Cover Up." The Age 9 Oct. 2010. < http://www.theage.com.au/victoria/under-the-coverup-20101008-16c1v.html >.Thrift, Nigel. “But Malice Afterthought: Cities and the Natural History of Hatred.” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 30 (2005): 133–50.Tissot, Sylvie. “Excluding Muslim Women: From Hijab to Niqab, from School to Public Space." Public Culture 23.1 (2011): 39–46.Valentine, Gill. “Living with Difference: Reflections on Geographies of Encounter.” Progress in Human Geography 32.3 (2008): 323–37.Wise, Amanda, and Selveraj Velayutham, eds. Everyday Multiculturalism. Houndsmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.YMCA. “VCAT Ruling on Swim Sessions at Dandenong Oasis to Open Up to Community During Ramadan Next Year.” 16 Sep. 2010. ‹http://www.victoria.ymca.org.au/cpa/htm/htm_news_detail.asp?page_id=13&news_id=360›.

Abstract:

In the 1960s, especially in the West, art that was revelatory and art that was revealing operated at opposite ends of the aesthetic spectrum. On the side of the revelatory we can think of encounters synonymous with modernism, in which an expressionist painting was revelatory of the Freudian unconscious, or a Barnett Newman the revelatory intensity of the sublime. By contrast, the impulse to reveal in 1960s art was rooted in post-Duchampian practice, implicating artists as different as Lynda Benglis and Richard Hamilton, who mined the potential of an art that was without essence. If revelatory art underscored modernism’s transcendental conviction, critically revealing work tested its discursive rules and institutional conventions. Of course, nothing in history happens as neatly as this suggests, but what is clear is how polarized the language of artistic revelation was throughout the 1960s. With the international spread of minimalism, pop art, and fluxus, provisional reveals eventually dominated art-historical discourse. Aesthetic conviction, with its spiritual undertones, was haunted by its demystification. In the words of Donald Judd: “a work needs only to be interesting” (184).That art galleries could be sites of timely socio-political issues, rather than timeless intuitions undersigned by medium specificity, is one of the more familiar origin stories of postmodernism. Few artists symbolize this shift more than Hans Haacke, whose 2019 exhibition All Connected, at the New Museum, New York, examined the legacy of his outward-looking work. Born in Germany in 1936, and a New Yorker since 1965, Haacke has been linked to the term “institutional critique” since the mid 1980s, after Mel Ramsden’s coining in 1975, and the increased recognition of kindred spirits such as Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Michael Asher, Martha Rosler, Robert Smithson, Daniel Buren, and Marcel Broodthaers. These artists have featured in books and essays by the likes of Benjamin Buchloh, Hal Foster, and Yve-Alain Bois, but they are also known for their own contributions to art discourse, producing hybrid conceptions of the intellectual postmodern artist as historian, critic and curator.Haacke was initially fascinated by kinetic sculpture in the early 1960s, taking inspiration from op art, systems art, and machine-oriented research collectives such as Zero (Germany), Gruppo N (Italy) and GRAV (France, an acronym of Groupe de Recherche d’Art Visuel). Towards the end of the decade he started to produce more overtly socio-political work, creating what would become a classic piece from this period, Gallery-Goers’ Birthplace and Residence Profile, Part 1 (1969). Here, in a solo exhibition at New York’s Howard Wise Gallery, the artist invited viewers to mark their birthplaces and places of residence on a map. Questioning the statistical demography of the Gallery’s avant-garde attendees, the exhibition anticipated the meticulous sociological character of much of his practice to come, grounding New York art – the centre of the art world – in local, social, and economic fabrics.In the forward to the catalogue of All Connected, New Museum Director Lisa Philips claims that Haacke’s survey exhibition provided a chance to reflect on the artist’s prescience, especially given the flourishing of art activism over the last five or so years. Philips pressed the issue of why no other American art institution had mounted a retrospective of his work in three decades, since his previous survey, Unfinished Business, at the New Museum in 1986, at its former, and much smaller, Soho digs (8). It suggests that other institutions have deemed Haacke’s work too risky, generating too much political heat for them to handle. It’s a reputation the artist has cultivated since the Guggenheim Museum famously cancelled his 1971 exhibition after learning his intended work, Shapolsky et al. Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, A Real Time Social System as of May 1, 1971 (1971) involved research into dubious New York real estate dealings. Guggenheim director Thomas Messer defended the censorship at the time, going so far as to describe it as an “alien substance that had entered the art museum organism” (Haacke, Framing 138). Exposé was this substance Messer dare not name: art that was too revealing, too journalistic, too partisan, and too politically viscid. (Three years later, Haacke got his own back with Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum Board of Trustees, 1974, exposing then Guggenheim board members’ connections to the copper industry in Chile, where socialist president Salvador Allende had just been overthrown with US backing.) All Connected foregrounded these institutional reveals from time past, at a moment in 2019 when the moral accountability of the art institution was on the art world’s collective mind. The exhibition followed high-profile protests at New York’s Whitney Museum and Metropolitan Museum of Art, as well as at Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art, the Louvre, and the British Museum. These and other arts organisations have increasingly faced pressures, fostered by social media, to end ties with unethical donors, sponsors, and board members, with activist groups protesting institutional affiliations ranging from immigration detention centre management to opioid and teargas manufacturing. An awareness of the limits of individual agency and autonomy undoubtedly defines this era, with social media platforms intensifying the encumbrances of individual, group, and organisational identities. Hans Haacke, Gallery-Goers’ Birthplace and Residence Profile, Part 1, 1969 Hans Haacke, Gallery-Goers’ Birthplace and Residence Profile, Part 2, 1969-71Unfinished BusinessUnderscoring Haacke’s activist credentials, Philips describes him as “a model of how to live ethically and empathetically in the world today”, and as a beacon of light amidst the “extreme political and economic uncertainty” of the present, Trump-presidency-calamity moment (7). This was markedly different to how Haacke’s previous New York retrospective, Unfinished Business, was received, which bore the weight of being the artist’s first museum exhibition in New York following the Guggenheim controversy. In the catalogue to Haacke’s 1986 exhibition, then New Museum director Marcia Tucker introduced his work as a challenge, cautiously claiming that he poses “trenchant questions” and that the institution accepts “the difficulties and contradictions” inherent to any museum staging of his work (6).Philips’s and Tucker’s distinct perspectives on Haacke’s practice – one as heroically ethical, the other as a sobering critical challenge – exemplify broader shifts in the perception of institutional critique (the art of the socio-political reveal) over this thirty-year period. In the words of Pamela M. Lee, between 1986 and 2019 the art world has undergone a “seismic transformation”, becoming “a sphere of influence at once more rapacious, acquisitive, and overweening but arguably more democratizing and ecumenical with respect to new audiences and artists involved” (87). Haacke’s reputation over this period has taken a similar shift, from him being a controversial opponent of art’s autonomy (an erudite postmodern conceptualist) to a figurehead for moral integrity and cohesive artistic experimentation.As Rosalyn Deutsche pointed out in the catalogue to Haacke’s 1986 exhibition, a potential trap of such a retrospective is that, through biographical positioning, Haacke might be seen as an “exemplary political artist” (210). With this, the specific political issues motivating his work would be overshadowed by the perception of the “great artist” – someone who brings single-issue politics into the narrative of postmodern art, but at the expense of the issues themselves. This is exactly what Douglas Crimp discovered in Unfinished Business. In a 1987 reflection on the show, Crimp argued that, when compared with an AIDS-themed display, hom*o Video, staged at the New Museum at the same time, reviewers of Haacke’s exhibition tended to analyse his politics “within the context of the individual artist’s body of work … . Political issues became secondary to the aesthetic strategies of the producer” (34). Crimp, whose activism would be at the forefront of his career in subsequent years, was surprised at how hom*o Video and Unfinished Business spawned different readings. Whereas works in the former exhibition tended to be addressed in terms of the artists personal and partisan politics, Haacke’s prompted reflection on the aesthetics-politics juxtaposition itself. For Crimp, the fact that “there was no mediation between these two shows”, spoke volumes about the divisions between political and activist art at the time.New York Times critic Michael Brenson, reiterating a comment made by Fredric Jameson in the catalogue for Unfinished Business, describes the timeless appearance of Haacke’s work in 1986, which is “surprising for an artist whose work is in some way about ideology and history” (Brenson). The implication is that the artist gives a surprisingly long aesthetic afterlife to the politically specific – to ordinarily short shelf-life issues. In this mode of critical postmodernism in which we are unable to distinguish clearly between intervening in and merely reproducing the logic of the system, Haacke is seen as an astute director of an albeit ambiguous push and pull between political specificity and aesthetic irreducibility, political externality and the internalist mode of art about art. Jameson, while granting that Haacke’s work highlights the need to reinvent the role of the “ruling class” in the complex, globalised socio-economic situation of postmodernism, claims that it does so as representative of the “new intellectual problematic” of postmodernism. Haacke, according Jameson, stages postmodernism’s “crisis of ‘mapping’” whereby capitalism’s totalizing, systemic forms are “handled” (note that he avoids “critiqued” or “challenged”) by focusing on their manifestation through particular (“micro-public”) institutional means (49, 50).We can think of the above examples as constituting the postmodern version of Haacke, who frames very specific political issues on the one hand, and the limitless incorporative power of appropriative practice on the other. To say this another way, Haacke, circa 1986, points to specific sites of power struggle at the same time as revealing their generic absorption by an art-world system grown accustomed to its “duplicate anything” parameters. For all of his political intent, the artistic realm, totalised in accordance with the postmodern image, is ultimately where many thought his gestures remained. The philosopher turned art critic Arthur Danto, in a negative review of Haacke’s exhibition, portrayed institutional critique as part of an age-old business of purifying art, maintaining that Haacke’s “crude” and “heavy-handed” practice is blind to how art institutions have always relied on some form of critique in order for them to continue being respected “brokers of spirit”. This perception – of Haacke’s “external” critiques merely serving to “internally” strengthen existing art structures – was reiterated by Leo Steinberg. Supportively misconstruing the artist in the exhibition catalogue, Steinberg writes that Haacke’s “political message, by dint of dissonance, becomes grating and shrill – but shrill within the art context. And while its political effectiveness is probably minimal, its effect on Minimal art may well be profound” (15). Hans Haacke, MOMA Poll, 1970 All ConnectedSo, what do we make of the transformed reception of Haacke’s work since the late 1980s: from a postmodern ouroboros of “politicizing aesthetics and aestheticizing politics” to a revelatory exemplar of art’s moral power? At a period in the late 1980s when the culture wars were in full swing and yet activist groups remained on the margins of what would become a “mainstream” art world, Unfinished Business was, perhaps, blindingly relevant to its times. Unusually for a retrospective, it provided little historical distance for its subject, with Haacke becoming a victim of the era’s propensity to “compartmentalize the interpretive registers of inside and outside and the terms corresponding to such spatial­izing coordinates” (Lee 83).If commentary surrounding this 2019 retrospective is anything to go by, politics no longer performs such a parasitic, oppositional or even dialectical relation to art; no longer is the political regarded as a real-world intrusion into the formal, discerning, longue-durée field of aesthetics. The fact that protests inside the museum have become more visible and vociferous in recent years testifies to this shift. For Jason Farrago, in his review of All Connected for the New York Times, “the fact that no person and no artwork stands alone, that all of us are enmeshed in systems of economic and social power, is for anyone under 40 a statement of the obvious”. For Alyssa Battistoni, in Frieze magazine, “if institutional critique is a practice, it is hard to see where it is better embodied than in organizing a union, strike or boycott”.Some responders to All Connected, such as Ben Lewis, acknowledge how difficult it is to extract a single critical or political strategy from Haacke’s body of work; however, we can say that, in general, earlier postmodern questions concerning the aestheticisation of the socio-political reveal no longer dominates the reception of his practice. Today, rather than treating art and politics are two separate but related entities, like form is to content, better ideas circulate, such as those espoused by Bruno Latour and Jacques Rancière, for whom what counts as political is not determined by a specific program, medium or forum, but by the capacity of any actor-network to disrupt and change a normative social fabric. Compare Jameson’s claim that Haacke’s corporate and museological tropes are “dead forms” – through which “no subject-position speaks, not even in protest” (38) – with Battistoni’s, who, seeing Haacke’s activism as implicit, asks the reader: “how can we take the relationship between art and politics as seriously as Haacke has insisted we must?”Crimp’s concern that Unfinished Business perpetuated an image of the artist as distant from the “political stakes” of his work did not carry through to All Connected, whose respondents were less vexed about the relation between art and politics, with many noting its timeliness. The New Museum was, ironically, undergoing its own equity crisis in the months leading up to the exhibition, with newly unionised staff fighting with the Museum over workers’ salaries and healthcare even as it organised to build a new $89-million Rem Koolhaas-designed extension. Battistoni addressed these disputes at-length, claiming the protests “crystallize perfectly the changes that have shaped the world over the half-century of Haacke’s career, and especially over the 33 years since his last New Museum exhibition”. Of note is how little attention Battistoni pays to Haacke’s artistic methods when recounting his assumed solidarity with these disputes, suggesting that works such as Creating Consent (1981), Helmosboro Country (1990), and Standortkultur (Corporate Culture) (1997) – which pivot on art’s public image versus its corporate umbilical cord – do not convey some special aesthetico-political insight into a totalizing capitalist system. Instead, “he has simply been an astute and honest observer long enough to remind us that our current state of affairs has been in formation for decades”.Hans Haacke, News, 1969/2008 Hans Haacke, Wide White Flow, 1967/2008 Showing Systems Early on in the 1960s, Haacke was influenced by the American critic, artist, and curator Jack Burnham, who in a 1968 essay, “Systems Esthetics” for Artforum, inaugurated the loose conceptualist paradigm that would become known as “systems art”. Here, against Greenbergian formalism and what he saw as the “craft fetishism” of modernism, Burnham argues that “change emanates, not from things, but from the way things are done” (30). Burnham thought that emergent contemporary artists were intuitively aware of the importance of the systems approach: the significant artist in 1968 “strives to reduce the technical and psychical distance between his artistic output and the productive means of society”, and pays particular attention to relationships between organic and non-organic systems (31).As Michael Fried observed of minimalism in his now legendary 1967 essay Art and Objecthood, this shift in sixties art – signalled by the widespread interest in the systematic – entailed a turn towards the spatial, institutional, and societal contexts of receivership. For Burnham, art is not about “material entities” that beautify or modify the environment; rather, art exists “in relations between people and between people and the components of their environment” (31). At the forefront of his mind was land art, computer art, and research-driven conceptualist practice, which, against Fried, has “no contrived confines such as the theatre proscenium or picture frame” (32). In a 1969 lecture at the Guggenheim, Burnham confessed that his research concerned not just art as a distinct entity, but aesthetics in its broadest possible sense, declaring “as far as art is concerned, I’m not particularly interested in it. I believe that aesthetics exists in revelation” (Ragain).Working under the aegis of Burnham’s systems art, Haacke was shaken by the tumultuous and televised politics of late-1960s America – a time when, according to Joan Didion, a “demented and seductive vortical tension was building in the community” (41). Haacke cites Martin Luther King’s assassination as an “incident that made me understand that, in addition to what I had called physical and biological systems, there are also social systems and that art is an integral part of the universe of social systems” (Haacke, Conversation 222). Haacke created News (1969) in response to this awareness, comprising a (pre-Twitter) telex machine that endlessly spits out live news updates from wire services, piling up rolls and rolls of paper on the floor of the exhibition space over the course of its display. Echoing Burnham’s idea of the artist as a programmer whose job is to “prepare new codes and analyze data”, News nonetheless presents the museum as anything but immune from politics, and technological systems as anything but impersonal (32).This intensification of social responsibility in Haacke’s work sets him apart from other, arguably more reductive techno-scientific systems artists such as Sonia Sheridan and Les Levine. The gradual transformation of his ecological and quasi-scientific sculptural experiments from 1968 onwards could almost be seen as making a mockery of the anthropocentrism described in Fried’s 1967 critique. Here, Fried claims not only that the literalness of minimalist work amounts to an emphasis on shape and spatial presence over pictorial composition, but also, in this “theatricality of objecthood” literalness paradoxically mirrors (153). At times in Fried’s essay the minimalist art object reads as a mute form of sociality, the spatial presence filled by the conscious experience of looking – the theatrical relationship itself put on view. Fried thought that viewers of minimalism were presented with themselves in relation to the entire world as object, to which they were asked not to respond in an engaged formalist sense but (generically) to react. Pre-empting the rise of conceptual art and the sociological experiments of post-conceptualist practice, Fried, unapprovingly, argues that minimalist artists unleash an anthropomorphism that “must somehow confront the beholder” (154).Haacke, who admits he has “always been sympathetic to so-called Minimal art” (Haacke, A Conversation 26) embraced the human subject around the same time that Fried’s essay was published. While Fried would have viewed this move as further illustrating the minimalist tendency towards anthropomorphic confrontation, it would be more accurate to describe Haacke’s subsequent works as social-environmental barometers. Haacke began staging interactions which, however dry or administrative, framed the interplays of culture and nature, inside and outside, private and public spheres, expanding art’s definition by looking to the social circulation and economy that supported it.Haacke’s approach – which seems largely driven to show, to reveal – anticipates the viewer in a way that Fried would disapprove, for whom absorbed viewers, and the irreduction of gestalt to shape, are the by-products of assessments of aesthetic quality. For Donald Judd, the promotion of interest over conviction signalled scepticism about Clement Greenberg’s quality standards; it was a way of acknowledging the limitations of qualitative judgement, and, perhaps, of knowledge more generally. In this way, minimalism’s aesthetic relations are not framed so much as allowed to “go on and on” – the artists’ doubt about aesthetic value producing this ongoing temporal quality, which conviction supposedly lacks.In contrast to Unfinished Business, the placing of Haacke’s early sixties works adjacent to his later, more political works in All Connected revealed something other than the tensions between postmodern socio-political reveal and modernist-formalist revelation. The question of whether to intervene in an operating system – whether to let such a system go on and on – was raised throughout the exhibition, literally and metaphorically. To be faced with the interactions of physical, biological, and social systems (in Condensation Cube, 1963-67, and Wide White Flow, 1967/2008, but also in later works like MetroMobiltan, 1985) is to be faced with the question of change and one’s place in it. Framing systems in full swing, at their best, Haacke’s kinetic and environmental works suggest two things: 1. That the systems on display will be ongoing if their component parts aren’t altered; and 2. Any alteration will alter the system as a whole, in minor or significant ways. Applied to his practice more generally, what Haacke’s work hinges on is whether or not one perceives oneself as part of its systemic relations. To see oneself implicated is to see beyond the work’s literal forms and representations. Here, systemic imbrication equates to moral realisation: one’s capacity to alter the system as the question of what to do. Unlike the phenomenology-oriented minimalists, the viewer’s participation is not always assumed in Haacke’s work, who follows a more hermeneutic model. In fact, Haacke’s systems are often circular, highlighting participation as a conscious disruption of flow rather than an obligation that emanates from a particular work (148).This is a theatrical scenario as Fried describes it, but it is far from an abandonment of the issue of profound value. In fact, if we accept that Haacke’s work foregrounds intervention as a moral choice, it is closer to Fried’s own rallying cry for conviction in aesthetic judgement. As Rex Butler has argued, Fried’s advocacy of conviction over sceptical interest can be understood as dialectical in the Hegelian sense: conviction is the overcoming of scepticism, in a similar way that Geist, or spirit, for Hegel, is “the very split between subject and object, in which each makes the other possible” (Butler). What is advanced for Fried is the idea of “a scepticism that can be remarked only from the position of conviction and a conviction that can speak of itself only as this scepticism” (for instance, in his attempt to overcome his scepticism of literalist art on the basis of its scepticism). Strong and unequivocal feelings in Fried’s writing are informed by weak and indeterminate feeling, just as moral conviction in Haacke – the feeling that I, the viewer, should do something – emerges from an awareness that the system will continue to function fine without me. In other words, before being read as “a barometer of the changing and charged atmosphere of the public sphere” (Sutton 16), the impact of Haacke’s work depends upon an initial revelation. It is the realisation not just that one is embroiled in a series of “invisible but fundamental” relations greater than oneself, but that, in responding to seemingly sovereign social systems, the question of our involvement is a moral one, a claim for determination founded through an overcoming of the systemic (Fry 31).Haacke’s at once open and closed works suit the logic of our algorithmic age, where viewers have to shift constantly from a position of being targeted to one of finding for oneself. Peculiarly, when Haacke’s online digital polls in All Connected were hacked by activists (who randomized statistical responses in order to compel the Museum “to redress their continuing complacency in capitalism”) the culprits claimed they did it in sympathy with his work, not in spite of it: “we see our work as extending and conversing with Haacke’s, an artist and thinker who has been a source of inspiration to us both” (Hakim). This response – undermining done with veneration – is indicative of the complicated legacy of his work today. Haacke’s influence on artists such as Tania Bruguera, Sam Durant, Forensic Architecture, Laura Poitras, Carsten Höller, and Andrea Fraser has less to do with a particular political ideal than with his unique promotion of journalistic suspicion and moral revelation in forms of systems mapping. It suggests a coda be added to the sentiment of All Connected: all might not be revealed, but how we respond matters. Hans Haacke, Large Condensation Cube, 1963–67ReferencesBattistoni, Alyssa. “After a Contract Fight with Its Workers, the New Museum Opens Hans Haacke’s ‘All Connected’.” Frieze 208 (2019).Bishara, Hakim. “Hans Haacke Gets Hacked by Activists at the New Museum.” Hyperallergic 21 Jan. 2010. <https://hyperallergic.com/538413/hans-haacke-gets-hacked-by-activists-at-the-new-museum/>.Brenson, Michael. “Art: In Political Tone, Works by Hans Haacke.” New York Times 19 Dec. 1988. <https://www.nytimes.com/1986/12/19/arts/artin-political-tone-worksby-hans-haacke.html>.Buchloh, Benjamin. “Hans Haacke: Memory and Instrumental Reason.” Neo-Avantgarde and Culture Industry. Cambridge: MIT P, 2000.Burnham, Jack. “Systems Esthetics.” Artforum 7.1 (1968).Butler, Rex. “Art and Objecthood: Fried against Fried.” Nonsite 22 (2017). <https://nonsite.org/feature/art-and-objecthood>.Carrion-Murayari, Gary, and Massimiliano Gioni (eds.). Hans Haacke: All Connected. New York: Phaidon and New Museum, 2019.Crimp, Douglas. “Strategies of Public Address: Which Media, Which Publics?” In Hal Foster (ed.), Discussions in Contemporary Culture, no. 1. Washington: Bay P, 1987.Danto, Arthur C. “Hans Haacke and the Industry of Art.” In Gregg Horowitz and Tom Huhn (eds.), The Wake of Art: Criticism, Philosophy, and the Ends of Taste. London: Routledge, 1987/1998.Didion, Joan. The White Album. London: 4th Estate, 2019.Farago, Jason. “Hans Haacke, at the New Museum, Takes No Prisoners.” New York Times 31 Oct. 2019. <https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/31/arts/design/hans-haacke-review-new-museum.html>.Fried, Michael. “Art and Objecthood.” Artforum 5 (June 1967).Fry, Edward. “Introduction to the Work of Hans Haacke.” In Hans Haacke 1967. Cambridge: MIT List Visual Arts Center, 2011.Glueck, Grace. “The Guggenheim Cancels Haacke’s Show.” New York Times 7 Apr. 1971.Gudel, Paul. “Michael Fried, Theatricality and the Threat of Skepticism.” Michael Fried and Philosophy. New York: Routledge, 2018.Haacke, Hans. Hans Haacke: Framing and Being Framed: 7 Works 1970-5. Halifax: P of the Nova Scotia College of Design and New York: New York UP, 1976.———. “Hans Haacke in Conversation with Gary Carrion-Murayari and Massimiliano Gioni.” Hans Haacke: All Connected. New York: Phaidon and New Museum, 2019.Haacke, Hans, et al. “A Conversation with Hans Haacke.” October 30 (1984).Haacke, Hans, and Brian Wallis (eds.). Hans Haacke: Unfinished Business. New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art; Cambridge, Mass: MIT P, 1986.“Haacke’s ‘All Connected.’” Frieze 25 Oct. 2019. <https://frieze.com/article/after-contract-fight-its-workers-new-museum-opens-hans-haackes-all-connected>.Judd, Donald. “Specific Objects.” Complete Writings 1959–1975. Halifax: P of the Nova Scotia College of Design and New York: New York UP, 1965/1975.Lee, Pamela M. “Unfinished ‘Unfinished Business.’” Hans Haacke: All Connected. New York: Phaidon P Limited and New Museum, 2019.Ragain, Melissa. “Jack Burnham (1931–2019).” Artforum 19 Mar. 2019. <https://www.artforum.com/passages/melissa-ragain-on-jack-burnham-78935>.Sutton, Gloria. “Hans Haacke: Works of Art, 1963–72.” Hans Haacke: All Connected. New York: Phaidon P Limited and New Museum, 2019.Tucker, Marcia. “Director’s Forward.” Hans Haacke: Unfinished Business. New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art; Cambridge, Mass: MIT P, 1986.

Abstract:

1. Guy Debord in the Land of the Long WeekendIt’s the weekend – leisure time. It’s the interlude when, Guy Debord contends, the proletarian is briefly free of the “total contempt so clearly built into every aspect of the organization and management of production” in commodity capitalism; when workers are temporarily “treated like grown-ups, with a great show of solicitude and politeness, in their new role as consumers.” But this patronising show turns out to be another form of subjection to the diktats of “political economy”: “the totality of human existence falls under the regime of the ‘perfected denial of man’.” (30). As Debord suggests, even the creation of leisure time and space is predicated upon a form of contempt: the “perfected denial” of who we, as living people, really are in the eyes of those who presume the power to legislate our working practices and private identities.This Saturday The Weekend Australian runs an opinion piece by Christopher Pearson, defending ABC Radio National’s Stephen Crittenden, whose program The Religion Report has been axed. “Some of Crittenden’s finest half-hours have been devoted to Islam in Australia in the wake of September 11,” Pearson writes. “Again and again he’s confronted a left-of-centre audience that expected multi-cultural pieties with disturbing assertions.” Along the way in this admirable Crusade, Pearson notes that Crittenden has exposed “the Left’s recent tendency to ally itself with Islam.” According to Pearson, Crittenden has also thankfully given oxygen to claims by James Cook University’s Mervyn Bendle, the “fairly conservative academic whose work sometimes appears in [these] pages,” that “the discipline of critical terrorism studies has been captured by neo-Marxists of a postmodern bent” (30). Both of these points are well beyond misunderstanding or untested proposition. If Pearson means them sincerely he should be embarrassed and sacked. But of course he does not and will not be. These are deliberate lies, the confabulations of an eminent right-wing culture warrior whose job is to vilify minorities and intellectuals (Bendle escapes censure as an academic because he occasionally scribbles for the Murdoch press). It should be observed, too, how the patent absurdity of Pearson’s remarks reveals the extent to which he holds the intelligence of his readers in contempt. And he is not original in peddling these toxic wares.In their insightful—often hilarious—study of Australian opinion writers, The War on Democracy, Niall Lucy and Steve Mickler identify the left-academic-Islam nexus as the brain-child of former Treasurer-cum-memoirist Peter Costello. The germinal moment was “a speech to the Australian American Leadership Dialogue forum at the Art Gallery of NSW in 2005” concerning anti-Americanism in Australian schools. Lucy and Mickler argue that “it was only a matter of time” before a conservative politician or journalist took the plunge to link the left and terrorism, and Costello plunged brilliantly. He drew a mental map of the Great Chain of Being: left-wing academics taught teacher trainees to be anti-American; teacher trainees became teachers and taught kids to be anti-American; anti-Americanism morphs into anti-Westernism; anti-Westernism veers into terrorism (38). This is contempt for the reasoning capacity of the Australian people and, further still, contempt for any observable reality. Not for nothing was Costello generally perceived by the public as a politician whose very physiognomy radiated smugness and contempt.Recycling Costello, Christopher Pearson’s article subtly interpellates the reader as an ordinary, common-sense individual who instinctively feels what’s right and has no need to think too much—thinking too much is the prerogative of “neo-Marxists” and postmodernists. Ultimately, Pearson’s article is about channelling outrage: directing the down-to-earth passions of the Australian people against stock-in-trade culture-war hate figures. And in Pearson’s paranoid world, words like “neo-Marxist” and “postmodern” are devoid of historical or intellectual meaning. They are, as Lucy and Mickler’s War on Democracy repeatedly demonstrate, mere ciphers packed with the baggage of contempt for independent critical thought itself.Contempt is everywhere this weekend. The Weekend Australian’s colour magazine runs a feature story on Malcolm Turnbull: one of those familiar profiles designed to reveal the everyday human touch of the political classes. In this puff-piece, Jennifer Hewett finds Turnbull has “a restless passion for participating in public life” (20); that beneath “the aggressive political rhetoric […] behind the journalist turned lawyer turned banker turned politician turned would-be prime minister is a man who really enjoys that human interaction, however brief, with the many, many ordinary people he encounters” (16). Given all this energetic turning, it’s a wonder that Turnbull has time for human interactions at all. The distinction here of Turnbull and “many, many ordinary people” – the anonymous masses – surely runs counter to Hewett’s brief to personalise and quotidianise him. Likewise, those two key words, “however brief”, have an unfortunate, unintended effect. Presumably meant to conjure a picture of Turnbull’s hectic schedules and serial turnings, the words also convey the image of a patrician who begrudgingly knows one of the costs of a political career is that common flesh must be pressed—but as gingerly as possible.Hewett proceeds to disclose that Turnbull is “no conservative cultural warrior”, “onfounds stereotypes” and “hates labels” (like any baby-boomer rebel) and “has always read widely on political philosophy—his favourite is Edmund Burke”. He sees the “role of the state above all as enabling people to do their best” but knows that “the main game is the economy” and is “content to play mainstream gesture politics” (19). I am genuinely puzzled by this and imagine that my intelligence is being held in contempt once again. That the man of substance is given to populist gesturing is problematic enough; but that the Burke fan believes the state is about personal empowerment is just too much. Maybe Turnbull is a fan of Burke’s complex writings on the sublime and the beautiful—but no, Hewett avers, Turnbull is engaged by Burke’s “political philosophy”. So what is it in Burke that Turnbull finds to favour?Turnbull’s invocation of Edmund Burke is empty, gestural and contradictory. The comfortable notion that the state helps people to realise their potential is contravened by Burke’s view that the state functions so “the inclinations of men should frequently be thwarted, their will controlled, and their passions brought into subjection… by a power out of themselves” (151). Nor does Burke believe that anyone of humble origins could or should rise to the top of the social heap: “The occupation of an hair-dresser, or of a working tallow-chandler, cannot be a matter of honour to any person… the state suffers oppression, if such as they, either individually or collectively, are permitted to rule” (138).If Turnbull’s main game as a would-be statesman is the economy, Burke profoundly disagrees: “the state ought not to be considered as nothing better than a partnership agreement in a trade of pepper and coffee, callico or tobacco, or some other such low concern… It is a partnership in all science; a partnership in all art; a partnership in every virtue, and in all perfection”—a sublime entity, not an economic manager (194). Burke understands, long before Antonio Gramsci or Louis Althusser, that individuals or social fractions must be made admirably “obedient” to the state “by consent or force” (195). Burke has a verdict on mainstream gesture politics too: “When men of rank sacrifice all ideas of dignity to an ambition without a distinct object, and work with low instruments and for low ends, the whole composition [of the state] becomes low and base” (136).Is Malcolm Turnbull so contemptuous of the public that he assumes nobody will notice the gross discrepancies between his own ideals and what Burke stands for? His invocation of Burke is, indeed, “mainstream gesture politics”: on one level, “Burke” signifies nothing more than Turnbull’s performance of himself as a deep thinker. In this process, the real Edmund Burke is historically erased; reduced to the status of stage-prop in the theatrical production of Turnbull’s mass-mediated identity. “Edmund Burke” is re-invented as a term in an aesthetic repertoire.This transmutation of knowledge and history into mere cipher is the staple trick of culture-war discourse. Jennifer Hewett casts Turnbull as “no conservative culture warrior”, but he certainly shows a facility with culture-war rhetoric. And as much as Turnbull “confounds stereotypes” his verbal gesture to Edmund Burke entrenches a stereotype: at another level, the incantation “Edmund Burke” is implicitly meant to connect Turnbull with conservative tradition—in the exact way that John Howard regularly self-nominated as a “Burkean conservative”.This appeal to tradition effectively places “the people” in a power relation. Tradition has a sublimity that is bigger than us; it precedes us and will outlast us. Consequently, for a politician to claim that tradition has fashioned him, that he is welded to it or perhaps even owns it as part of his heritage, is to glibly imply an authority greater than that of “the many, many ordinary people”—Burke’s hair-dressers and tallow-chandlers—whose company he so briefly enjoys.In The Ideology of the Aesthetic, Terry Eagleton assesses one of Burke’s important legacies, placing him beside another eighteenth-century thinker so loved by the right—Adam Smith. Ideology of the Aesthetic is premised on the view that “Aesthetics is born as a discourse of the body”; that the aesthetic gives form to the “primitive materialism” of human passions and organises “the whole of our sensate life together… a society’s somatic, sensational life” (13). Reading Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments, Eagleton discerns that society appears as “an immense machine, whose regular and harmonious movements produce a thousand agreeable effects”, like “any production of human art”. In Smith’s work, the “whole of social life is aestheticized” and people inhabit “a social order so spontaneously cohesive that its members no longer need to think about it.” In Burke, Eagleton discovers that the aesthetics of “manners” can be understood in terms of Gramscian hegemony: “in the aesthetics of social conduct, or ‘culture’ as it would later be called, the law is always with us, as the very unconscious structure of our life”, and as a result conformity to a dominant ideological order is deeply felt as pleasurable and beautiful (37, 42). When this conservative aesthetic enters the realm of politics, Eagleton contends, the “right turn, from Burke” onwards follows a dark trajectory: “forget about theoretical analysis… view society as a self-grounding organism, all of whose parts miraculously interpenetrate without conflict and require no rational justification. Think with the blood and the body. Remember that tradition is always wiser and richer than one’s own poor, pitiable ego. It is this line of descent, in one of its tributaries, which will lead to the Third Reich” (368–9).2. Jean Baudrillard, the Nazis and Public MemoryIn 1937, during the Spanish Civil War, the Third Reich’s Condor Legion of the Luftwaffe was on loan to Franco’s forces. On 26 April that year, the Condor Legion bombed the market-town of Guernica: the first deliberate attempt to obliterate an entire town from the air and the first experiment in what became known as “terror bombing”—the targeting of civilians. A legacy of this violence was Pablo Picasso’s monumental canvas Guernica – the best-known anti-war painting in art history.When US Secretary of State Colin Powell addressed the United Nations on 5 February 2003 to make the case for war on Iraq, he stopped to face the press in the UN building’s lobby. The doorstop was globally televised, packaged as a moment of incredible significance: history in the making. It was also theatre: a moment in which history was staged as “event” and the real traces of history were carefully erased. Millions of viewers world-wide were undoubtedly unaware that the blue backdrop before which Powell stood was specifically designed to cover the full-scale tapestry copy of Picasso’s Guernica. This one-act, agitprop drama was a splendid example of politics as aesthetic action: a “performance” of history in the making which required the loss of actual historical memory enshrined in Guernica. Powell’s performance took its cues from the culture wars, which require the ceaseless erasure of history and public memory—on this occasion enacted on a breathtaking global, rather than national, scale.Inside the UN chamber, Powell’s performance was equally staged-crafted. As he brandished vials of ersatz anthrax, the power-point behind him (the theatrical set) showed artists’ impressions of imaginary mobile chemical weapons laboratories. Powell was playing lead role in a kind of populist, hyperreal production. It was Jean Baudrillard’s postmodernism, no less, as the media space in which Powell acted out the drama was not a secondary representation of reality but a reality of its own; the overheads of mobile weapons labs were simulacra, “models of a real without origins or reality”, pictures referring to nothing but themselves (2). In short, Powell’s performance was anchored in a “semiurgic” aesthetic; and it was a dreadful real-life enactment of Walter Benjamin’s maxim that “All efforts to render politics aesthetic culminate in one thing: war” (241).For Benjamin, “Fascism attempts to organize the newly created proletarian masses without affecting the property structure which the masses strive to eliminate.” Fascism gave “these masses not their right, but instead a chance to express themselves.” In turn, this required “the introduction of aesthetics into politics”, the objective of which was “the production of ritual values” (241). Under Adolf Hitler’s Reich, people were able to express themselves but only via the rehearsal of officially produced ritual values: by their participation in the disquisition on what Germany meant and what it meant to be German, by the aesthetic regulation of their passions. As Frederic Spotts’ fine study Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics reveals, this passionate disquisition permeated public and private life, through the artfully constructed total field of national narratives, myths, symbols and iconographies. And the ritualistic reiteration of national values in Nazi Germany hinged on two things: contempt and memory loss.By April 1945, as Berlin fell, Hitler’s contempt for the German people was at its apogee. Hitler ordered a scorched earth operation: the destruction of everything from factories to farms to food stores. The Russians would get nothing, the German people would perish. Albert Speer refused to implement the plan and remembered that “Until then… Germany and Hitler had been synonymous in my mind. But now I saw two entities opposed… A passionate love of one’s country… a leader who seemed to hate his people” (Sereny 472). But Hitler’s contempt for the German people was betrayed in the blusterous pages of Mein Kampf years earlier: “The receptivity of the great masses is very limited, their intelligence is small, but their power of forgetting is enormous” (165). On the back of this belief, Hitler launched what today would be called a culture war, with its Jewish folk devils, loathsome Marxist intellectuals, incitement of popular passions, invented traditions, historical erasures and constant iteration of values.When Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer fled Fascism, landing in the United States, their view of capitalist democracy borrowed from Benjamin and anticipated both Baudrillard and Guy Debord. In their well-know essay on “The Culture Industry”, in Dialectic of Enlightenment, they applied Benjamin’s insight on mass self-expression and the maintenance of property relations and ritual values to American popular culture: “All are free to dance and enjoy themselves”, but the freedom to choose how to do so “proves to be the freedom to choose what is always the same”, manufactured by monopoly capital (161–162). Anticipating Baudrillard, they found a society in which “only the copy appears: in the movie theatre, the photograph; on the radio, the recording” (143). And anticipating Debord’s “perfected denial of man” they found a society where work and leisure were structured by the repetition-compulsion principles of capitalism: where people became consumers who appeared “s statistics on research organization charts” (123). “Culture” came to do people’s thinking for them: “Pleasure always means not to think about anything, to forget suffering even where it is shown” (144).In this mass-mediated environment, a culture of repetitions, simulacra, billboards and flickering screens, Adorno and Horkheimer concluded that language lost its historical anchorages: “Innumerable people use words and expressions which they have either ceased to understand or employ only because they trigger off conditioned reflexes” in precisely the same way that the illusory “free” expression of passions in Germany operated, where words were “debased by the Fascist pseudo-folk community” (166).I know that the turf of the culture wars, the US and Australia, are not Fascist states; and I know that “the first one to mention the Nazis loses the argument”. I know, too, that there are obvious shortcomings in Adorno and Horkheimer’s reactions to popular culture and these have been widely criticised. However, I would suggest that there is a great deal of value still in Frankfurt School analyses of what we might call the “authoritarian popular” which can be applied to the conservative prosecution of populist culture wars today. Think, for example, how the concept of a “pseudo folk community” might well describe the earthy, common-sense public constructed and interpellated by right-wing culture warriors: America’s Joe Six-Pack, John Howard’s battlers or Kevin Rudd’s working families.In fact, Adorno and Horkheimer’s observations on language go to the heart of a contemporary culture war strategy. Words lose their history, becoming ciphers and “triggers” in a politicised lexicon. Later, Roland Barthes would write that this is a form of myth-making: “myth is constituted by the loss of the historical quality of things.” Barthes reasoned further that “Bourgeois ideology continuously transforms the products of history into essential types”, generating a “cultural logic” and an ideological re-ordering of the world (142). Types such as “neo-Marxist”, “postmodernist” and “Burkean conservative”.Surely, Benjamin’s assessment that Fascism gives “the people” the occasion to express itself, but only through “values”, describes the right’s pernicious incitement of the mythic “dispossessed mainstream” to reclaim its voice: to shout down the noisy minorities—the gays, greenies, blacks, feminists, multiculturalists and neo-Marxist postmodernists—who’ve apparently been running the show. Even more telling, Benjamin’s insight that the incitement to self-expression is connected to the maintenance of property relations, to economic power, is crucial to understanding the contemptuous conduct of culture wars.3. Jesus Dunked in Urine from Kansas to CronullaAmerican commentator Thomas Frank bases his study What’s the Matter with Kansas? on this very point. Subtitled How Conservatives Won the Heart of America, Frank’s book is a striking analysis of the indexation of Chicago School free-market reform and the mobilisation of “explosive social issues—summoning public outrage over everything from busing to un-Christian art—which it then marries to pro-business policies”; but it is the “economic achievements” of free-market capitalism, “not the forgettable skirmishes of the never-ending culture wars” that are conservatism’s “greatest monuments.” Nevertheless, the culture wars are necessary as Chicago School economic thinking consigns American communities to the rust belt. The promise of “free-market miracles” fails ordinary Americans, Frank reasons, leaving them in “backlash” mode: angry, bewildered and broke. And in this context, culture wars are a convenient form of anger management: “Because some artist decides to shock the hicks by dunking Jesus in urine, the entire planet must remake itself along the lines preferred” by nationalist, populist moralism and free-market fundamentalism (5).When John Howard received the neo-conservative American Enterprise Institute’s Irving Kristol Award, on 6 March 2008, he gave a speech in Washington titled “Sharing Our Common Values”. The nub of the speech was Howard’s revelation that he understood the index of neo-liberal economics and culture wars precisely as Thomas Frank does. Howard told the AEI audience that under his prime ministership Australia had “pursued reform and further modernisation of our economy” and that this inevitably meant “dislocation for communities”. This “reform-dislocation” package needed the palliative of a culture war, with his government preaching the “consistency and reassurance” of “our nation’s traditional values… pride in her history”; his government “became assertive about the intrinsic worth of our national identity. In the process we ended the seemingly endless seminar about that identity which had been in progress for some years.” Howard’s boast that his government ended the “seminar” on national identity insinuates an important point. “Seminar” is a culture-war cipher for intellection, just as “pride” is code for passion; so Howard’s self-proclaimed achievement, in Terry Eagleton’s terms, was to valorise “the blood and the body” over “theoretical analysis”. This speaks stratospheric contempt: ordinary people have their identity fashioned for them; they need not think about it, only feel it deeply and passionately according to “ritual values”. Undoubtedly this paved the way to Cronulla.The rubric of Howard’s speech—“Sharing Our Common Values”—was both a homage to international neo-conservatism and a reminder that culture wars are a trans-national phenomenon. In his address, Howard said that in all his “years in politics” he had not heard a “more evocative political slogan” than Ronald Reagan’s “Morning in America”—the rhetorical catch-cry for moral re-awakening that launched the culture wars. According to Lawrence Grossberg, America’s culture wars were predicated on the perception that the nation was afflicted by “a crisis of our lack of passion, of not caring enough about the values we hold… a crisis of nihilism which, while not restructuring our ideological beliefs, has undermined our ability to organise effective action on their behalf”; and this “New Right” alarmism “operates in the conjuncture of economics and popular culture” and “a popular struggle by which culture can lead politics” in the passionate pursuit of ritual values (31–2). When popular culture leads politics in this way we are in the zone of the image, myth and Adorno and Horkheimer’s “trigger words” that have lost their history. In this context, McKenzie Wark observes that “radical writers influenced by Marx will see the idea of culture as compensation for a fragmented and alienated life as a con. Guy Debord, perhaps the last of the great revolutionary thinkers of Europe, will call it “the spectacle”’ (20). Adorno and Horkheimer might well have called it “the authoritarian popular”. As Jonathan Charteris-Black’s work capably demonstrates, all politicians have their own idiolect: their personally coded language, preferred narratives and myths; their own vision of who “the people” might or should be that is conjured in their words. But the language of the culture wars is different. It is not a personal idiolect. It is a shared vocabulary, a networked vernacular, a pervasive trans-national aesthetic that pivots on the fact that words like “neo-Marxist”, “postmodern” and “Edmund Burke” have no historical or intellectual context or content: they exist as the ciphers of “values”. And the fact that culture warriors continually mouth them is a supreme act of contempt: it robs the public of its memory. And that’s why, as Lucy and Mickler’s War on Democracy so wittily argues, if there are any postmodernists left they’ll be on the right.Benjamin, Adorno, Horkheimer and, later, Debord and Grossberg understood how the political activation of the popular constitutes a hegemonic project. The result is nothing short of persuading “the people” to collaborate in its own oppression. The activation of the popular is perfectly geared to an age where the main stage of political life is the mainstream media; an age in which, Charteris-Black notes, political classes assume the general antipathy of publics to social change and act on the principle that the most effective political messages are sold to “the people” by an appeal “to familiar experiences”—market populism (10). In her substantial study The Persuaders, Sally Young cites an Australian Labor Party survey, conducted by pollster Rod Cameron in the late 1970s, in which the party’s message machine was finely tuned to this populist position. The survey also dripped with contempt for ordinary people: their “Interest in political philosophy… is very low… They are essentially the products (and supporters) of mass market commercialism”. Young observes that this view of “the people” was the foundation of a new order of political advertising and the conduct of politics on the mass-media stage. Cameron’s profile of “ordinary people” went on to assert that they are fatally attracted to “a moderate leader who is strong… but can understand and represent their value system” (47): a prescription for populist discourse which begs the question of whether the values a politician or party represent via the media are ever really those of “the people”. More likely, people are hegemonised into a value system which they take to be theirs. Writing of the media side of the equation, David Salter raises the point that when media “moguls thunder about ‘the public interest’ what they really mean is ‘what we think the public is interested in”, which is quite another matter… Why this self-serving deception is still so sheepishly accepted by the same public it is so often used to violate remains a mystery” (40).Sally Young’s Persuaders retails a story that she sees as “symbolic” of the new world of mass-mediated political life. The story concerns Mark Latham and his “revolutionary” journeys to regional Australia to meet the people. “When a political leader who holds a public meeting is dubbed a ‘revolutionary’”, Young rightly observes, “something has gone seriously wrong”. She notes how Latham’s “use of old-fashioned ‘meet-and-greet’campaigning methods was seen as a breath of fresh air because it was unlike the type of packaged, stage-managed and media-dependent politics that have become the norm in Australia.” Except that it wasn’t. “A media pack of thirty journalists trailed Latham in a bus”, meaning, that he was not meeting the people at all (6–7). He was traducing the people as participants in a media spectacle, as his “meet and greet” was designed to fill the image-banks of print and electronic media. Even meeting the people becomes a media pseudo-event in which the people impersonate the people for the camera’s benefit; a spectacle as artfully deceitful as Colin Powell’s UN performance on Iraq.If the success of this kind of “self-serving deception” is a mystery to David Salter, it would not be so to the Frankfurt School. For them, an understanding of the processes of mass-mediated politics sits somewhere near the core of their analysis of the culture industries in the “democratic” world. I think the Frankfurt school should be restored to a more important role in the project of cultural studies. Apart from an aversion to jazz and other supposedly “elitist” heresies, thinkers like Adorno, Benjamin, Horkheimer and their progeny Debord have a functional claim to provide the theory for us to expose the machinations of the politics of contempt and its aesthetic ruses.ReferencesAdorno, Theodor and Max Horkheimer. "The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception." Dialectic of Enlightenment. London: Verso, 1979. 120–167.Barthes Roland. “Myth Today.” Mythologies. Trans. Annette Lavers. St Albans: Paladin, 1972. 109–58.Baudrillard, Jean. Simulations. New York: Semiotext(e), 1983.Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Illuminations. Ed. Hannah Arendt. Trans. Harry Zorn. New York: Schocken Books, 1969. 217–251.Burke, Edmund. Reflections on the Revolution in France. Ed. Conor Cruise O’Brien. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969.Charteris-Black, Jonathan. Politicians and Rhetoric: The Persuasive Power of Metaphor. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle. Trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith. New York: Zone Books, 1994.Eagleton, Terry. The Ideology of the Aesthetic. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990.Frank, Thomas. What’s the Matter with Kansas?: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2004.Grossberg, Lawrence. “It’s a Sin: Politics, Post-Modernity and the Popular.” It’s a Sin: Essays on Postmodern Politics & Culture. Eds. Tony Fry, Ann Curthoys and Paul Patton. Sydney: Power Publications, 1988. 6–71.Hewett, Jennifer. “The Opportunist.” The Weekend Australian Magazine. 25–26 October 2008. 16–22.Hitler, Adolf. Mein Kampf. Trans. Ralph Manheim. 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