[Nettime-bold] Generational analysis

["Lachlan Brown" <lachlan@london.com>]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Lachlan Brown" <lachlan@london.com>
Date: Wed, 27 Mar 2002 23:28:05 -0500
To: undercurrents@bbs.thing.net
Subject: Generational analysis


> 'All good things come in threes'. Stuart 
Hall,
> on Cultural Studies, the Free Floating 
Signifier of Race, and the realities of 
Lewisham, 1996
> 
> Culture is complex. Our approaches to analysing culture are relatively simple. However, these approaches begin to resemble 
> culture and find helpful descriptions of 
cultural processes when we combine an oppression, like gender, with an element in 
the social formation, like policy, and then 
consider a particular context, like an 
> industry that has an obvious economic 
aspect.
> 
> I think that the three positionalities
> in analysing cultural processes and impacts:
 race, class and gender allow independently
> good analysis of cultural products and 
> phenomenon. Combined, any combination is 
powerful, they provide devastating analysis, 
identifying new questions about 
> ideas, policies, legalities and the economy,
 almost triangulating them, fixing them for 
> sustained critique over time.

> 
> However, it always seems to be forgotten 
> or set aside, dis-remembered, erased perhaps
 if we let it be, especially these days when 
> scholars seem to have forgotten what they 
> were educated to do, is that the cultural 
material only becomes apparent when each of 
> these oppressions is considered historically
>  and generationally. The work of studying 
> culture is work in the prodution and 
> reproduction of knowledge across generations.

> 

> McRobbie doesn't 'do' girls and fashion, 
> she does generation and feminism. If her 
interest extends from here to the culture 
industries of education and commerce, well, 
> it would, wouldn't it? Morley doesn't 'do' 
> television, he does class and generation 
> where it was seen to be most productively 
> played out in domestic contexts of 
technology of media and communications. That 
these micro, domestic, local contexts are 
inter-related with global contexts is 
hardly surprising given the increase in 
shared media and communication. And Gilroy 
does whether he likes it or not, race and
 generation. if the European Enlightenment 
Project comes under scrutiny and revison as 
an outcome, that's hardly surprising.
> 
> Yes, generation, it underpins the study 
of culture. Its the reason we do it. There 
are usually three generations around at 
any one time, they embody the experience of
 three before them and always already 
consider three yet to come. (Some societies 
have greater memory and foresight than 
Western societies which rely on History 
and archives, perhaps presently under revision, such as the Iriquois who remembered 
and anticipated seven generations and 
factored these in to their politics). Lets 
consider the questions we are raising through the focus of social status, of ethnicity, and 
of gencder and sexuality, with respect to beliefs, politics and regulation as economies that relate to The Economy, but are only made 
 meaningful when we are required to consider 
the impacts on three generations, or any one 
of three.

> Lets think about the impacts on children, 
> OUR children, for whom IT seems designed 
> and marketed) I heard an ad today for 
online learning for first graders...
> and let's think about what children will 
> have to say when they find out their 
> parents haven't been telling them the whole 
story  about information technology and its 
culture.
> 
> Let's think about that.
> 
> Make sense?
> 
> Lachlan Brown
> 
> 
> -- 
> 
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