The intellectual outside: Anti-intellectualism and the subject of populist discourses in Australian newspapers

Abstract

A discourse analysis of anti-intellectualism in Australian newspapers, this study proceeds from the philosophical and theoretical assumptions of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe's discourse theory, integrating into that framework several methodological tools for close textual analysis. Focusing on four interrelated anti-intellectual themes drawn from a corpus of 60 newspaper articles, it examines the discursive struggles that have hegemonized some anti-intellectualist meanings and excluded others. Placing these struggles into the historical and political context of the 1990s and 2000s, newspaper anti-intellectualist discourse can be understood as one articulation of an emergent populism that aimed to reconstruct a traditional Australian social space. However, it is shown to be the overdetermination of intellectualism as difference or differing – by virtue of its very formal structure – that makes it stand over and above other articulations, such as anti-refugee, anti-gay and anti-Aboriginal articulations. Thus, rather than being a contingent articulation, intellectualism is shown to be highly prone to disarticulation, and thus presents as a signifier peculiarly suited to strategic deployment as ‘other’ in the constitution of a populist Australian subject.

View correction statement:

Erratum

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank John Frow and David Bennett for their helpful comments and suggestions on an earlier version of this paper. I am also grateful to the two anonymous reviewers for their feedback and suggestions.

Notes

 1. Laclau and Mouffe borrow Lacan's concept of the point de capiton, or quilting point, which they define as ‘a particular element assuming a “universal” structuring function within a certain discurisve field – actually, whatever organisation that field has is only the result of that function – without the particularity of the element per se predetermining such a function’ (1985xi).

 2. See also Žižek (1990, 252).

 3. Similarly to Foucault, Laclau and Mouffe regard the coherence of a discourse as manifest in its ‘regularity in dispersion’, though they reject Foucault's distinction between discursive and non-discursive practices. For a fuller explication of the principles of Laclau and Mouffe's discourse theory, see Laclau and Mouffe (1985, 105–14).

 4. ‘Articulation’ here means both to utter, and to form a relation. For discourse theory, it is the regularity of their usage within a given speech community that constitutes the relations between the various signifiers of a discourse. To articulate is thus to act on both the synchronic (paradigmatic) and diachronic (syntagmatic) axes of discourse. See Laclau and Mouffe (1985, 105); and, on the centrality of the term to cultural studies, Hall (in Grossberg 1986, 53–55).

 5. Itself defined by the Macquarie (1998) as ‘true, honest, genuine’.

 6. The rhetorical force of the anti-intellectual attack is not weakened by quoting a professor. The predication of Pinker as ‘famed’ articulates him with ‘the people’, while his nominal academic status presents him as reformed, having seen the error of his ways.

 7. Hall elaborates: ‘The figures of “the other”, banished to the edge of the conceptual and constructed as the absolute opposite, the negation, of everything which the West stood for, reappeared at the very centre of the discourse of civilization, refinement, modernity and development in the West. The “Other” was the “dark” side – forgotten, repressed and denied; the [antithesis] of Enlightenement and modernity’. (1992, 313–4)

 8. See Davis (2008, 42–77) for an account of how two 1984 speeches by Geoffrey Blainey and Hugh Morgan first broke the taboo against questioning the racial make-up of immigration, a theme that continued to reverberate in the discourse of columnists such as Janet Albrechtsen, Piers Akerman, Andrew Bolt, Miranda Devine, writers such as Paul Sheehan and Gail Betts, and talkback hosts such as Alan Jones and Stan Zemanek.

 9. Under these circumstances, and despite the fact the Murdoch press dominates Australian metropolitan circulation, that the most virulent expressions of anti-intellectualism observed in this study originated in Murdoch papers might be seen as less than coincidental.

10. As employed by Laclau (2005, 115), objet petit a – ‘the key element in a social ontology’ – is what is ‘in the object more than the object’, a sublime kernel lurking beneath the surface. The objet petit a provides impetus to the hegemonic process by keeping this hidden object out of reach; hence the centrality in ideological discourse of the promise of bringing back something irretrievable.

11. Rutherford finds much the same logic of stolen enjoyment in notions of the ‘Australian Good’. See particularly her discussion of Tim Winton's The Riders (Rutherford 2000, 128).

12. For instance: ‘down-to-earth’, ‘head in the clouds’, ‘feet on the ground’, ‘ivory tower’.