Provocation

Adrian Martin Independent Scholar, Adjunct Monash University

‘I Write to You From a Far-Off Country …’

It seems to me that the situation of the pandemic actually proves the opposite of what some people try to demonstrate, namely this omnipresence of a security power controlling minds and bodies. What the pandemic has produced is not so much a society of control as a society of dispersion. I think there is a great paranoia bound up with the very concept of biopolitics, which has been added to the older paranoia of Marxist logic, which always points to a great hidden power. All of this has led to this situation where most thinking that wants to be in opposition shares this great obsession with an irresistible power that takes hold of our minds and our bodies. Insofar as representations are not idle ideas but ways of organising our perceived world, to assume this power is to make it operative.

– Jacques Rancière, 2021, www.newframe.com/maintaining-dissent-with-jacques- ranciere/

Around 10 or 12 years ago – at what now seems like the onset of a long, arduous period in university and related higher-level education – I complained to a wise friend about the institution in which I was then teaching. “Upper management is always announcing a new crisis”, I whined. “A crisis of budget, of international enrolments, of resources … Every six months, a new crisis!” My friend narrowed his eyes and replied: “Universities are good at exploiting whatever crises arise, for their own managerial ends”. And he added, darkly: “They may even be good at manufacturing those crises”. Help!

That’s the language of paranoia, of hidden conspiracy, which Jacques Rancière refers to in the quotation above. Every bad thing that happens to the workers on the ground is the result of a malign plan hatched in the boardrooms above. Every awful turn in the course of things could have been predicted, down to the finest detail, by the gloomiest, most pessimistic theory of the social order. Of course, my friend’s prognosis was formulated long before the COVID pandemic hit the globe. And he just has to be wrong on that one, yes? We can assume (I hope) that the virus was not hatched within a university think-tank for the sake of a massive administrative shake-out of personnel, teaching programs and institutional goals. Although, as a cinephile who grew up glued to stuff like the conspiracy- fevered The Parallax View (1974), I do find myself wondering, in my darkest moments …

The landscape of higher education has changed, perhaps irrevocably, over recent years – not only because of COVID, but pandemic conditions have definitely accelerated (at warp speed) these changes. More than ever, it seems, teachers, researchers, and staff at all levels are ‘subject to the dictates’ of those running the institutions. Many people of my acquaintance (and, more or less, my age) have gladly retired from or grimly lost their jobs, and those who remain have needed to adapt to an entirely new regime of all-purpose, online teaching (most recently reintegrated, not without technical difficulties, into a return to face-to-face [or mask-to-mask] teaching). Younger scholars face an ever-more-vicious, dead-end cycle of casual labour. The impossible balancing-act of setting priorities – between teaching, research, publication, administration, grant application writing, and (last but definitely least, it seems) public ‘outreach’ to the wider community – is further knocked out of balance with each new institutional decree ‘from above’.

The effects on students – which have barely begun to be documented – may be even more severe: my social media feed is awash with accounts of dives in enrolment numbers; the ominous emotional ‘withdrawal’ of students who refuse to either speak or let themselves be seen in Zoom classes; the plight of those who were digitally signed-up for study in one country and physically stranded in another; the rise in depressive illnesses, stress levels and general social alienation; and the overall draining away of a sense of purpose to almost any education beyond the strictly ‘vocational’. The unavoidable air of global apocalypse (especially in relation to environmental conditions), the endless talk of end-times and end-games, certainly does not aid any valiant, local attempts at job reform or amelioration of teaching conditions …

Inevitably, the Humanities have been struck hard by the ‘streamlining’ shifts and restructurings instituted within education. Not to mention within the governmental culture at large, as the recent controversy involving the ‘discretionary’ axing of select Australian Research Council (ARC) proposals has shown (at least that particular debacle is now under

official investigation). Then, within the broad umbrella of a Humanities which is now under siege, we come to that portion of it with which the SSAAANZ constituency is most immediately concerned: cinema/media/TV/screen/digital studies.

I open a necessary parenthesis to admit here: I no longer live in Australia (or New Zealand), and I no longer teach full-time in any university. I am not in the Belly of the Beast, as most of my readers within SSAAANZ are. My contacts with higher education, in various countries, are now intermittent, freelance, officially ‘adjunct’. Like Chris Marker said in Sunless (1983): “I write to you from a far-off country …”. But I do have an outsider’s sense, from the network of everyone I know and everything I read and hear every day, and from my own previous university experience, of the ongoing crisis in the field.

Field: let’s dwell, for a moment, on that strange word. Screen studies – I’ll stay with that accommodating term for what we do, which is quite diverse – has never really had a field (or ‘discipline’) to call its own (unlike, say, History or Mathematics). It emerged out of an ever-shifting configuration of faculties, departments, programs, subjects and courses. In my own lifetime, I’ve seen it associated with – and then often, down the track, abruptly dissociated from – a wide range of areas, including Performance, Fine Arts, Communications, Cultural Studies, Policy Studies, Literature, ‘Media Arts’ (whatever that was!), Media Archaeology, and most recently, various digital domains (such as data studies). The uneasy and never fully resolved split between ‘pure critical theory’ studies and practical, hands-on training (whether in an open-ended, experimental, ‘art school’ mode, or more vocationally/industrially oriented) has, in the long run, hobbled Screen Studies far more than, say, Music or Theatre Studies. The equivalent salve to Creative Writing – which has bolstered and temporarily saved many a Literature department over a period of at least six decades – has not yet fully emerged in Screen Studies, despite the growing interest in (I speak from vast experience here!) the ‘video essay’ format.

Of course, I am well aware that other Humanities fields which might seem, to outsiders, more established and secure (such as Literature or Philosophy) have undergone some of the same ceaseless, seismic shifts in their institutional placement and enforced co- habitation with other ‘disciplines’ – and today face some of the same fears of imminent devastation. Could it possibly have turned out differently – and, if so, how could we have known which was the best bet to take? Making do with, and finding the best opportunities within, whatever situation you find yourself in: this has long been the norm for most Humanities educators and researchers in what Rancière calls a “society of dispersion”. But, by the same token, the clarion call of necessary ‘interdisciplinarity’ and cross-silo collaboration has, alas, never really saved us, for very long, from the circling sharks and yawning abysses. We gain what ground we can, while we can, in an eternally ad hoc fashion.

Making do: there have been upsides to the Zoom Revolution foisted on us. Sure, we lament the absence of in-person conferences, flesh-and-blood archive visits, and communal arts events (all very slowly returning, now, to some ‘new normal’ state of functioning). But every week I find myself astonished at the international range of lectures, panels and conferences in which I can spectate and/or participate – something that was simply impossible before the pandemic. A similarly positive upheaval has occurred at the level of access to the screen (and screen-related) materials we study: numerous streaming sites, online festivals, libraries and other independent/maverick cultural initiatives have cracked open global archives in a truly unprecedented (although, of course, never ‘complete’ or exhaustive) way. And much of this (both lectures and screen-texts) is available for free – although, when organisers of academic conferences now tell me they run events on a ‘zero Zoom budget’, I do wonder where all the old funds are being redistributed within the university system …

Continuing on the downside, the paths of academic publishing – even brave online journals including Screening the Past, Peephole, Movie (UK) or The Cine-Files (USA) – have slowed down their productivity considerably, and sometimes dropped dead altogether, during the pandemic, in an acute reflection of the stress, occupational realignment and overwork factors that overwhelm many in academia at present. Just as worryingly, corporation-level academic publishing has embraced the digital age with frightening zealotry: intellectual/specialised books or journal issues are no longer physical objects that most people buy or even just browse (only libraries can afford the monstrously high prices, which itself leads to massive ‘rationalisations’ of what is purchased for use), and every publication, whether single- or multi-authored, is now disaggregated into individual, fragmented ‘pieces’ for (usually expensive) online sale. In a paradox characteristic of our time, the ‘independent researcher’ (like me, and there are now plenty more like me after the tidal wave of retrenchments and retirement packages) can find the academic world simultaneously both more open and more closed than ever!

Being an unreconstructed Humanist at heart, I keep coming back, in my mind, to a human experience: the number of educators I know, people who have (for the most part) devoted the majority of their adult lives (however ambivalently) to the university system, telling me lately that they have arrived at a genuine point of existential crisis: why go on toiling ‘inside the system’, what’s the point of it when so much of that system is collapsing, or giving up whatever residual values it once had? What good is it doing anybody, teacher, researcher or student? Old pedagogic illusions are going up in flames, while new, positive, inspiring or galvanising agendas ‘across the board’ of the dispersed Screen Studies field are slow to appear. Many educators today are fired by a renewed need for activism; but where will this activism best be located and performed? Inside or outside the academies, or somewhere imaginable in-between?

I once heard a cultural scholar make an important distinction, between crisis and emergency. Crisis evokes panic, fright, blockage, breakdown; whereas emergency suggests that something may yet emerge from the rubble. So, on with the discussion of our Screen Studies Emergency.

© Adrian Martin, March 2022