Creativity, the ‘new humanism’ and cultural studies

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Notes

Terry Flew is Head of Media and Communications in the Creative Industries Faculty, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia, and the author of New Media: an Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2002). Correspondence to: Dr Terry Flew, Creative Industries Faculty, Queensland University of Technology, GPO Box 2434, Brisbane, Queensland 4001, Australia. Tel.: [phone]; Fax: [phone]; E‐mail: [email protected]

In the case of the ‘Be Creative!’ exhibitors, these values are identified as female, perhaps in contrast to the creative artists‐as‐tortured genius metaphor which has dominated in popular consciousness, whose persona has been understood as primarily male (Battersby, 1989).

I was prompted to write this paper in part by the Keynote Address of Professor Meaghan Morris to the 2002 Cultural Studies Association of Australasia Conference in Melbourne, where she discussed her appointment as a Professor of Cultural Studies at Lingnan University, a Hong Kong higher educational institution involved primarily in management education, in terms of the need to develop ‘soft skills’ and ‘whole person’ attributes in graduates in a changing business culture.

Meredyth (1998, p. 39) argued that those who adopted a left‐humanities critique of educational reform under the Labor governments from 1989 to 1996 should have supported their ‘bureaucratic ambition’, in light of the more decisive turn towards neo‐liberal models of higher education policy adopted by the conservative Howard government after its election in 1996.

Readings also associated the rise of cultural studies with the rise of global capitalism and the decline of the modernist project of the university producing subjects imbued with a training in culture in the context of effective nation‐states. For Readings, the rise of cultural studies occurs when ‘culture ceases to be the animating principle of the University and … becomes instead an object of study among many others, a discipline rather than a metadisciplinary idea’ (Readings, 1996, p. 92). A more explicit association of cultural studies with neo‐liberalism can be found in Frank (2000, pp. 285–292).

At a more mundane level, I recall a cocktail party in Brisbane, organized by the Australian Broadcasting Authority, where a prominent Professor of Humanities at a Brisbane university was bemoaning the influence of humanism on the High Court bench. Such arguments were bemusing to the editor of a leading Queensland newspaper, who assumed that humanities academics supported humanism on the part of the judiciary, particularly as a bulwark against the decidedly less humanistic attitudes of many of their readers towards others in their community, such as those who committed violent crimes.

The Australian Technology Network (ATN) universities include Curtin University of Technology, Queensland University of Technology, the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, the University of South Australia, and the University of Technology, Sydney. All were universities created out of institutional amalgamations in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and have their origins in the former institutes of technology. All of these institutions place a strong focus upon training for industry and the professions, and their orientation towards ‘real world’ problem solving.

Bennett critiqued Stuart Hall's argument that cultural studies should proceed ‘as if’ a socially marginalized and politically mobilized constituency will emerge that matches the intellectual ambitions of cultural studies to produce a new form of ‘common sense’ (Hall, 1992). Bennett (1992, p. 34) argued that there is no evidence of a social collectivity emerging that shares a broadly counter‐hegemonic position that can be appropriately supplemented by cultural studies discourse. He also questioned the claim that cultural studies should have such a counter‐hegemonic intellectual project, arguing that such a demand for cultural studies is driven by ‘a degree of its misrecognition of its relations to the real conditions of its existence that can only be described as ideological’ (Bennett, 1992, p. 34).

There are, of course, those who apply a cultural studies perspective to their practical work in the media and cultural industries, with Adrian Martin's film reviewing for The Age, Catharine Lumby's work as a columnist for The Bulletin, and Alan McKee's presence as an academic‐in‐residence on Big Brother coming to mind as relevant Australian examples. What continues to make these questions pertinent is the role of cultural studies education in the context of mass undergraduate education, where most graduates can expect more prosaic career outcomes.

On ‘creativity brokering’ and cultural entrepreneurship, see Leadbeater & Oakley (1999), Bilton & Leary (2002) and McRobbie (2002).

For recent histories of communications studies in Australia, see Putnis & Axford (2002) and Wilson (2001).

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Notes on contributors

Terry Flew

Terry Flew is Head of Media and Communications in the Creative Industries Faculty, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia, and the author of New Media: an Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2002). Correspondence to: Dr Terry Flew, Creative Industries Faculty, Queensland University of Technology, GPO Box 2434, Brisbane, Queensland 4001, Australia. Tel.: [phone]; Fax: [phone]; E‐mail: [email protected]