<nettime> the res publica

[McKenzie Wark <mwark@laurel.ocs.mq.edu.au>]

Nettimers,

Geert asked me for my thoughts on the referendum on the republic issue in
Australia, which prompted this column on it, and on the issue of public
communication in general. I'm punting (it's Melbourne Cup week!) on a win
for the 'no' case in the referendum this weekend. 

zczc
*aus*edued*
catchline:Wark-column

The Unspeakable Public
McKenzie Wark

Sometimes it seems like the whole country is embarked on a strange voyage
of discovery. Like explorers, we're mapping the edges of a continent of
culture we thought we knew -- but don't.

Where do you begin to explain a referendum on the republic -- defeated by
republicans! I'm an instinctive yes-voter, but something about the
republican movement never quite gelled with me. I actually wrote against
it in 1995, which brought the usual school-masterly rebukes from the
letter writers. But I didn't get it right then, and haven't since. If I
was too dim witted to understand what was going on in this process, at
least I wasn't alone. The only people who really seem to have played a
good hand are a few unprincipled monarchists who have exploited the public
mood with shameless hypocrisy.

The other person I've heard with a good explanation is Peter Botsman, who
spoke at Gleebooks last week. Peter is working on a book for Pluto Press
which he previewed for a small audience.

He argued that the radical democratic strand in Australian constitutional
culture has been written out of its public history. The direct election
republicans are not republicans at all, but democrats, and are an echo of
a largely forgotten tradition of democratic culture. 

Botsman views the desire to directly elect the president as a misplaced
ambition for a worthy tradition. It seeks to democratise the wrong office.
Perhaps we need to look elsewhere for democratising initiatives.

You hear remarkably little about the dangers of democracy.  Democracy
means majority rule. Democracy, left to its own devices, empowers
majorities to suppress minorities. Hence the 'republican' elements in
Australian government -- the separation of powers, the independence of the
courts.

It was the high court that enunciated the property right of Aboriginal
people -- native title -- against popular calls in some quarters to use
the democratic power of the parliament to attempt to overturn that right.

That democracy has its dark side is not a popular idea with either left of
right wing democrats. Both have a fantasy in their minds about "the
people", who, left to govern themselves, will be enlightened and as sweet
as pie. Of course, left and right democrats are not dreaming of the same
people. Pauline Hanson's "people" are not Moira Rayner's "people".

It used to bother me that I'd written two books on Australian cultural
politics and political culture, one of which even had "republic" in the
title, without really addressing the republican issue. I now think that,
in a stupid, blundering way, I was trying to suggest that there really was
another agenda. Here's a few belated thoughts from a slow learner. 

Before the institution of the head of state can be fixed, another
institution needs attention. The institution of public communication. As
Mark Latham points, this has come to be dominated by the rhetoric of
insiders versus outsiders -- something the monarchists exploited with
maximum impact and minimum scruple.

The sense of exclusion, of being outside a public realm that someone else
controls can be manipulated -- the imported rhetoric of attacking
"political correctness" had that function. It elevated certain senses of
exclusion above others. It recognises working class white male feelings of
exclusion, or that of the rural or the elderly, but not that of, say,
Vietnamese migrants.

The problem is less an elite of insiders excluding particular outsiders,
but a general rhetorical strategy employed by a wide range of groups and
their chosen representatives, of using a tactic of exclusion as the first
and last resort for commanding the institutions of public space.

The reform on which many others may depend is rhetorical reform, the
reform of the codes of communication. Public speech has to include the
other's voice, it has to find some comfort with the unknown, the outsider,
with what might be considered "bad".

This is why I argued in The Virtual Republic that Helen Demidenko had to
be read. The pre-emptive exclusion of "bad" voices doesn't made for good
public communication. Good communication isn't made by deciding in advance
that only people you think are good people can be heard. Bad people --
whatever that means -- are best heard. Good communication arises out of
the negotiation of the differences among radically dissimilar voices. 

Likewise, the vulgar, the popular, has to be heard too, as I argued in
Celebrities, Culture and Cyberspace. Discrimination against the lower
orders waged via the discrimination against their tastes is the liberal
alternative to racism. The morals of what Mark Davis calls "coterie
liberals" are on this score as bad One Nation racists. Both despise
another group but claim not to, and cloak their hated behind coded words. 

The reform of communication, then, seems to me to be one of finding a way
to open spaces of dialogue, even the odd shouting match, so that people
can learn for themselves how to be self-governing. What seemed clear from
the One Nation experience is that Pauline's "people" want to be self
governing but don't know how. The direct election campaigners want to
democratise government, even if they have picked the wrong institution.

There is actually a lot of talk about the reform of communication in
Australia -- by which what is meant is the technology and who will own it.
Australians are early adopters, eager to pick up any new communication
tool and use it, usually for private ends. But for all the interest in the
means of communication, there seems to me to be little talk about the
codes and practices, the conduct and comportment, of public communication.
The tool is not the craft.

There's plenty of talk among academics about the "public sphere" and
"citizenship", but most of what I've read in those literatures talk as if
the media simply didn't exist. Or it is seen as some nuisance distraction
from the "real" issues. It all seems rather remote from how Australians
actually communicate -- or fail to communicate -- with each other, in
public. Talk about the ideal of the public sphere seems to have no
relation to the actual one.

I'm optimistic about the actual public communication that's going on. I'm
certainly learning things I didn't know, about what people hope for, what
they fear. But people seem to feel forced to seize any opportunity going
to talk about exclusion, rather than the issue at hand. Unless more people
feel there's a space for their differences within public communication on
a day to day basis, then every referendum, every election, every inquiry
will be used to stage the spectacle of the non- cooperation of the
excluded. 

People are grappling, from the bottom up, with how to talk to each other.
But if political institutions are to become more democratic, communication
has to become less democratic, and more "virtual". Less a matter of the
struggle to speak in a majoritarian voice and exclude the other. More a
matter of a plurality of differences, in conflict, but all included.

Most of the critics of public communication approach it through their
prejudices. Those who think it is declining due to "political correctness"
aren't really too comfortable with Aboriginal speech, women's speech,
migrant accents. Any of that is too much. Those who think it is declining
because of "tabloidisation" really hate the working class, the uneducated,
and think they should be neither seen nor heard, and need not have their
tastes or desired catered to. How can we talk about what's good for "the
people" if all those wogs and welfare mums keep yabbering on?

I've long argued that the strategic, economic and political changes at the
global level meant not only economic change in Australia, but cultural
change as well. I think we can add to that the belated insight that the
institution of public conversation is also being forced to adapt. We can't
take for granted any more who "the people of Australia" are, or what they
want, or how they might speak -- if given half the chance.

Maybe some of those Indonesian commentators are right.  They think we're
don't listen to them and talk down to them. They should hear how we talk
about each other! 

McKenzie Wark lectures in media studies at Macquarie 
University.

nnnn

__________________________________________
"We no longer have roots, we have aerials."
http://www.mcs.mq.edu.au/~mwark
 -- McKenzie Wark 



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