Check yourself before you wreck yourself!

What has Cultural Studies done to urban culture?

Raygun has become quite the internet phenomenon in a way that no one really wants to experience. You can barely have a casual scroll on your social media currently without seeing the kangaroo paws of Australia’s most famous white lady Olympic breaker.

In reaction to the general hilarity and embarrassment of the Ragun phenomenon, we are seeing the progressive establishment run toward Raygun with a big warm hug, forgetting any concepts of racial privilege or cultural appropriation that may abound when a white woman obviously lacking skill and talent is sent to the Olympics in a dance proliferated among black urban poor.

What we are seeing played out before our eyes is a Dr Jekyll and Ms Hyde of progressive Australia. The respectability of Dr Rachael Gunn, not quite successful in suppressing the ugly underbelly of mayhem that our progressive elite are wreaking on valuable forms of western culture.

Dr Rachel Gunn has a PHD in Cultural Studies and is a lecturer at Macquarie University. Raygun, her alter ego, sports her now familiar duck face to her 175,000 followers on Instagram in a variety of outfits and contexts, and clearly enjoys the attention, as performers are wont to do. But when Raygun showed up at the Olympics with a performance that made the entire nation of Australia shrink with cringe into the folds of their sofas, questions have been asked.

I have no expertise in breaking, apart from having lived through the 80s and spent some time standing around cardboard on which boys would spin. I do have some experience in Cultural Studies however, and once thought I would make a career in the field.

I wrote my honours thesis on mapping and governing urban culture at the Institute for Cultural Policy Studies at Griffith University in the nineties. I was intending to take a PhD path. In the early 90’s, Humanities departments were being pressured by the Labor Government to become vocational. The Humanities were going to sing for their supper by making policy for government, and so they have.

As my Honors year went on, I became increasingly less comfortable with the idea of making cultural policy as a career, the direction my honours thesis was taking disturbed me.

My honours thesis argued, under the direction of my supervisor, and with the help of Foucault, that culture could be mapped in the urban landscape and governed. I highlighted that culture has always been an interest of government; without mentioning the ways that cultural policy could go tragically wrong, as it did, for instance, with segregation.

I argued that government could manage the damage the market was doing to displaced ethnic population from the inner city in the early 90’s with cultural policy. I did not address the reality that government has its own interests, and those interests can align with capital, against the interests of the population.

What has emerged over the decades, is not just a dispassionate utilisation of cultural resources by government, but a philosophical framework that rationalises government intervention into urban cultural resources as part of the progressive project to create equity and diversity.

The now familiar urban cultural policy approach looks like this; we may acknowledge that Indigenous people are not able to assemble in the new shopping mall, as they did in the park it has replaced, but we will commission a local Indigenous artist to do a mosaic, include a well-lit public meeting space named after an Indigenous elder, and open the mall with a “welcome to country”. Cultural Studies produces governmental solutions to human problems created by an expanding capitalist market.

Broadly, the humanities now provides the honey that is designed to make the government assigned medicine to go down. The narrative and strategies at the public face of a government in overstep into the cultural capital of the citizens it is paid to serve.

The humanities and particularly the “studies” (gender studies, colonial studies etc) now has a reputation for being the loopy engine of ‘woke’ ideology, but the humanities once placed ethical guardrails around the study of human culture and history, that are now being dangerously disregarded.

Sections of the humanities has been ringing internal alarm bells for over a hundred years of the danger of pimping out the humanities to ideologues, politics, government and the market.

In the early 20th century, Max Weber, one of the fathers of Social Science begged his intellectual colleagues to remove the search for political, personal and spiritual enlightenment from the lecture theatre and scorn the influence of personality and fame in academia.

In his famous essay ‘Science as a Vocation’ (1918), Weber argued that the “prophet and the demagogue do not belong on the academic platform”. He claimed that academics who leaned into philosophical and pollical corruption of their work were evading “plain duty and intellectual integrity”.

Emeritus Professor Ian Hunter from Queensland University wrote about Weber’s famous paper for the Institute of the Advanced study in the Humanities in 2018, suggesting that the warning Weber sounded is just as relevant today as it was in war-torn Germany.

Professor Hunter highlights that Webers “value free” approach to the social and historical academic disciplines was pushed aside in the Frankfurt School in favour of the left leaning Hegelian approach that now dominates the humanities. He posits that where the humanities has gone wrong is in the “core methodological protocol”.

The lack of discipline in the humanities and its usefulness to government have made a once respectable academic field, a public and running joke. For me Raygun is the living embodiment of the tragedy of the modern western humanities.

Last year Dr Gunn was interviewed on the ABC about a Sydney City Council grant she received for researching street dance culture in Sydney. Dr Gunn said that street dancing is “grounded in African American traditions of social dance” that emphasise “individual identity” and “community”.

Breaking then becomes a vehicle for the cultural characteristics of “individual identity” and “community” to be materialised. In Raygun’s, now famous, Olympic performance, she showcases moves like the sprinkler and the kangaroo hop to reference Australian wildlife and the suburban lifestyle in Australia.

Apart from the cultural signposts in the dance, Raygun seemed to completely lack other more technical aspects of breaking, like speed, skill and natural talent. This gave Raygun’s performance a ridiculous appearance and arguably mocked the country she represented and the economic oppression breaking emerged from.

Australian progressives have become so cavalier with their assumed ownership of other people’s cultural capital, that a 36 year old white university lecturer, representing Australia in the Olympics for a dance created by the black urban youth, doesn’t seem jarring to our elite, but it does to absolutely everyone else.

When Dr Gunn was asked by the ABC radio presenter James Valentine how to promote breaking in Sydney streets with the ratepayer’s money that she had been granted, she insisted that there are material circumstances government can create to encourage breaking in the streets.

The actual circumstances that created breaking was a population that survived the slave trade, championed the most powerful civil rights movement the world has ever seen, were restructured into urban poverty, and in that material oppression create prolific dance and music artforms.

But we don’t look that way, Dr Gunn talks of the problems of the weather and street safety for dancers, so the presenter suggests the conditions to create breaking in the street may be “a shade cloth and a security guard”? “Yeah that’s right” Dr Gunn replies. One wonders how the street dances of the 1980s in New Youk City would have reacted to the state providing them with a security guard.

When cultural studies began to be employed by the broader progressive cultural project, ethical guardrails to academic discipline were unlikely to survive the purposes of the state and the forces of the market.

The arrogance in the way modern Cultural Studies engages with human cultures is inappropriately authoritative in nature, and the narratives that are weaved reveal a failing progressive project fought on clear class lines.

In the 30 years since leaving my humanities studies, I have watched the humanities, and the lobby groups that the humanities inform, be paid to cook ‘values’ in a confected kind of cultural science, in line with government and capital objectives.

In doing so, progressive ideologues who dominate universities, assume to hold the cultural, political and moral capital, not just of the civil rights movement, but feminism, disability advocacy, the worker, and in the case of Raygun, the marginalised urban poor.

We are not witnessing a “mind virus” or “woke gone mad” we are seeing a targeted strategy, developed over decades, to control cultural resources that belong to population groups.

Raygun has become visual representation of the colonisation of absolutely everything good and beautiful that arises from human despair, and I am pretty sure this is not what she would have wanted from a hobby she so clearly loves.

To Cultural Studies academics, my advice would be to check yourselves before you wreck yourselves, but I know I am decades too late.