Editorial (with goanna)

John Hartley
Cardiff University, Wales

The International Journal of Cultural Studies (ICS) focuses on culture as an

object of study and cultural studies as a mode of inquiry. The object of study
is understood very broadly as the production of meaning in new topogra-
phies of knowledge, with an investigative emphasis on popular media,
everyday culture, ordinary life. The mode of inquiry into culture is inter- or
even post-disciplinary; culture needs explanation from multiple perspec-

tives, including textual, social, political, and historical approaches to ques-

tions of international communication, power, exchange and technology.
While the journal recognizes that theory and position are important in ana-
lytical work, priority will be given to studies which also explore a definite
archive or cultural form. Hence, among other things, the ’international’
journal will be a cumulative source of ’local’ analysis across the range of
media (from music to multimedia), and ordinary practices (from eating to
acting). The International Journal of Cultural Studies is post-disciplinary in
the sense that it seeks to identify and promote approaches that go beyond
the disciplinary as well as the national geography of 20th-century modern-
ism, dealing directly with the topography revealed by cultural studies during
its current phase.
The International Journal of Cultural Studies aims to become a lively
meeting place for international perspectives on cultural and media develop-
ments across the globe; and a place where different intellectual and politi-
cal traditions can come into fruitful dialogue with each other. This way,
cultural studies can be seen to have multiple origins and destinations, and
multiple voices, even while it uses such forums as the journal to identify
where it has come from, what it does best, what it entails textually, socially,

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politically or historically, and where it stops being cultural studies

altogether.
The International Journal of Cultural Studies is committed to the inter-
national dimension of cultural studies in two ways. First the journal wants
to attract contributions from a wide range of countries. The institutional
base of cultural studies is strong along a ’triple-A’ (Anglo-American-
Australian) axis, from where work of high quality will rightly press its claim
for publication. But ICS will reach beyond these regions, actively seeking
work from and about Africa, Asia, Latin America, and continental Europe.
While it can only publish work in the English language, it is nevertheless
curious about the circumstances of culture and media in non-anglophone
parts of the world, and hopes to become a forum for readers from all areas
to keep in touch with developments and debates elsewhere.
Second, ICS is interested in the study of international aspects of culture
and media. While there has been much discussion of globalization in recent
years, culture and media have been organized as international industries for
decades (motion-pictures, radio) or for centuries (publishing, music). Even
’national’ media, such as television in its early phase, were international at
the point of production, exchanging ideas, personnel, formats and shows
widely if not freely. But now, the consumption of media, the practice of
everyday culture, and the pursuit of ordinary life are experienced as inter-
national on a scale previously unknown, and people display a more self-
consciously international ’sense of themselves’. Tourism, the Internet, and
sport are all participatory forms of culture with strong international aspects
for their users; long-haul travel for large numbers of people has at last been
emancipated from military purposes. The International Journal of Cultural
Studies welcomes research and analysis of these evolving processes, and dis-
cussion of their impact in different regional contexts.
A feature of ICS is that it is interested in the politics and implications of
academic research itself. This means that it will promote work that analy-
ses the theoretical and disciplinary discourses of cultural and media studies,
or that which historicizes the critical ideologies and prejudices that have
accrued to the field, seeing them as phenomena in need of explanation,
rather than as part of the explanatory framework. It goes without saying
that academic and intellectual debate has also been fully internationalized
for many years; indeed the convergence between ’intellectual’ and ’popular’
circuits of meaning is one of the most interesting aspects of the field of study.
The International Journal of Cultural Studies takes culture and media to
be subject to various historic developments during the modern period.
Relevant long-term, international changes centre on:

-
social relations: from classes based on the mode of production of com-
modities to relations between publics and professionals whose ’power’
is based on knowledge;
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-
production: from capital investment in material production (factories) to
the capitalization of language (information, knowledge, media and
culture); .

~ collectivities: from crowds and communities to audiences and reader-

ships ; from collective organization to therapeutic self-management; from
leadership to celebrity;
® masculine public culture to politicizing femi-
politics: from prioritizing
nized and sexualized private consumption; from theories of freedom to
questions of identity; from national/imperial Eurocentrism to regional-
ization, and the ’global south’;
- communication: from actual to virtual representation, in an economy of
communication in which intensity of semiosis maps the substance of
power; from verbal to visual literacies; print to screen and ’mass’ (broad-
cast) to interactive media.

In such conditions, the preoccupations of classic social theory - for instance

with production, the city, modernization, the public sphere, the individual
and the state - have been upstaged socially, and it is their implied opposites
-

consumption, the suburb, postmodernity, the private sphere, the audience

and the global - that have taken centre-stage. New dynamics of economic
and political power are based not on class conflict or technological advance,
but on the development of popular culture itself, including sectors like sport,
leisure, food, travel, fashion and shopping, as well as media, music, enter-
tainment and the traditional culture industries.
Meanwhile, the discourse of ’culture’ has escaped from the intellectual
domain into the boardroom, where ’cultural studies’ is now a management
and marketing skill for the conduct of business by transnational corpora-
tions. Textual analysis, critical readings and the philosophy of culture have
also escaped the academy, into the media, where knowledge and semiosis
are not only produced but also hotly contested, as semiotic warriors (shock-

jocks, spin-doctors, pundits, politicians, journalists, lobbyists, advertisers,

PR and media-intellectuals and critics) struggle with each other on air to
convince an increasingly virtualized and unknowable public that their

images, words and knowledges have greater emotional and intellectual

power than those of the competition.
The International Journal of Cultural Studies therefore sees culture not
only as the sphere of meaning-production among ordinary people in their
everyday lives, but also culture as the place where, and media as the means
by which, new forms of social ascendancy based on the power to speak to,
about, and on behalf of whole populations, are being worked through on a
global scale. In such circumstances, the media critic, cultural commentator
and the semio-historian of ordinariness are no longer distinct from their
object of study. Any attempt to achieve critical distance is compromised
from the start. Not only are different media integrating technologically, but
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historically opposed knowledge-brokers are also converging socially, so that

’critical intellectual work’ and ’media entertainment’ can be hard to disen-
tangle. You are as likely to hear the (anti-media) views of the Frankfurt
School expounded in the media as in the seminar-room; ’spin-doctors’ are
also doctors of philosophy; what counts as true is established in advertising
as well as in news. Entire periods, nations, and political issues can be

encapsulated in a film, a popular movement, or a commercial campaign, and

while academics cannot compete with the volume and capitalization of
popular knowledge, they can and do participate in its formation.
While it follows that the critic of popular culture is no longer able to claim
objective or privileged distance from the topography being studied, it is also
increasingly the case that media, cultural and communication studies act as
the new philosophies of the age, testing the truths, practical reasoning and
sense-making strategies of contemporary culture as and where they arise, in
visual, verbal or virtual form.
The International Journal of Cultural Studies encourages scholarship
which is explicitly post-disciplinary and multi-perspectival. It is dedicated
to a critical conversation which has characterized cultural studies from the
start; a colloquy among disciplinarily, geographically and ideologically dis-
persed researchers who are willing to experiment with methods, improvise
explanations and modify theories, in order to develop a flexible, open,
useful, and self-reflexive repertoire of explanatory narratives and methods.
It will encourage cordial as well as critical debate between differing pos-
itions and specialisms, so that the reader who browses its contents will find
unanticipated affinities with work from other fields, rather than a narrow
and punitive insistence on one particular ’-ology’.

Goanna

The image on ICS’s cover is taken from an installation by the Australian artist
Grant Hobson, exhibited as CATTLE GRID/sight unseen at the Perth Insti-
tute of Contemporary Art in 1997 (see Figure 1) under the slogan ‘Is there

only one way of looking at your country?’ In that context the images were
very large (381 cm square), and in his accompanying notes Hobson challenges
the viewer to rethink the way they see land and place: ’A cattle grid is a subtle
but effective movement restrictor. Whether intentional or not the spirit of this
land has so far remained beyond the grasp of white Australian culture, just
out there in the hazed distance.’ Hobson’s goanna, ‘intentionally selected and
abstracted to represent a model or symbol’, works also as a ’model or symbol’
for ICS. At the beginning of a new intellectual journey that will end up who
knows where, the grid marks the point at which we leave familiar territory;
but it marks also the need to see the explanatory potential of surprise, per-
plexity, disorientation in any excursion through new landscapes.
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Figure 1 Grant Hobson. CATTLE GRID/sight unseen. View #1. As installed at the
Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts, Western Australia, January 1997.
Photo: Rene Raulin.

The cover-idea arose because I wanted to base the design on a photo-

graphic rather than calligraphic image, and one that has a strong visual
interest of its own. However, I was equally keen to avoid literal illustrations
of ’international cultural studies’, wanting instead to find a picture that _

suggested a new take on the subject. I also wanted something that could not
be mistaken for a European image, since part of our mission is to represent
non-metropolitan regions. And I was hoping to find an image that was
neither hopelessly abstract nor blindingly obvious, but would repay a
second glance.
Hobson’s goanna is a very strong image. It is both very clear, in terms of
light/dark contrast, and also elusive. You can see it as a pattern or texture,
but you can also see that it is a picture of something; something that speaks
about the uneasy relations between human space and landscape, nature and
culture, life and death, indigenous and western knowledges. Its scale (see
Figure 2), texture, internal space and borders are part of its own analysis of
the threshold of the familiar (as exhibited, its physicality is foregrounded
not only by its outlandish scale but also its non-canonical materials: ’Jet-

spray Reproduction on Vinyl from Digital Scan’). It looks both familiar and
unfamiliar at once, both attractive and hard-edged, not altogether pleasant,
certainly worth looking at more than once. Its out-of-placeness on the cover
of ICS promotes a ’way of seeing’ that looks for new meanings in new
territories, without deciding in advance what they are. It’s a perfect dialogue
between framing and observing on the one hand, and the nature of the
object so captured on the other. It signals that ICS is interested in visual
culture, in strong images, and maybe in things that are ’off’.
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Figure 2 Grant Hobson. CATTLE GRID/sight unseen. Ten images each 381 1 cm X
381 cm, Digital jetspray on Vinyl. View #2. As installed at the Perth Institute of Con-
temporary Arts, Western Australia, January 1997.
Photo: René Raulin.

Grant Hobson’s notes on the CATTLE GRID/sight unseen exhibition

signal another connection, this time with the cultural industries and media
that will be a familiar part of ICS’s contents. Hobson takes a sidelong, cer-
tainly critical, look at these:
More often the true value of anything is established on a consumer basis and
then allocated its status accordingly. Signage and advertising play major roles
in our lives, shaping our habits, behaviour and responses as consumers. The
real landscape and its silent calling is rarely given the consideration, space or
access to our subconscious ’hotlines’.... Competition for space in the lucra-

tive mental niches of the consumer psyche is now a very expensive, surreal
and aggressive industry.
Hobson’s goanna is already a species of cultural studies; a reflection on the
same objects of study that will preoccupy ICS in coming issues. As he says:
’Much information struggles to be heard in the small crowded livingroom
of the human subconscious.’ We hope to make some of it conscious.