Small magazines come and go, but Arena has come and stayed for forty years. When it was launched, in 1963, the whole of the Left was in the depths of a moral crisis, the Cold War offered the prospect of nuclear devastation, while every person or organisation that seemed sympathetic to 'them' or likely to harbour doubts about 'us' was subject to surveillance or infiltration. As historian Stuart Macintyre has noted, 'A fear of communism permeated almost every aspect of public life'.
At the beginning, Arena was quite explicitly marxist in orientation -- but with a difference. Some of its supporters and editors were members of the Communist Party, some were not, but their common commitment was to the perennial ideals of socialism. Mainly university people by background, they were secular idealists who had lived through the disenchantment that followed the public admission of decades of arbitrary imprisonment and execution in the USSR.
Arena was not the first magazine to offer a left response to the new conditions. Outlook, a Sydney-based publication, was a more immediately political, as well as a humanitarian response to the crisis of the working-class movement while Overland, a Melbourne-based periodical founded in 1954, was a left-oriented cultural and literary magazine in the democratic spirit of the 'legend of the nineties'. In its prospective content Arena fell somewhere between these two. Its distinctive feature was the attempt to break out of the limitations of received marxist interpretations of the rapid expansion of the intellectually related groupings in the years following the end of World War II.
From its first issue, Arena had an open door to a whole range of possible contributors. As well as attempting to develop a theoretical framework which might contribute to the renewal of the Left, it was a platform and a rallying point. Overland, Outlook, Arena too, all drew support from those who believed that socialism was the ideal of living together in relative harmony with equality and cooperation as active and ruling principles within social life. Given Arena's theoretical emphasis, it was perhaps more difficult for this underlying ethical impulse to find full expression. That was a challenge for all of its future editors.
In responding to changes in the workforce, along with the cultural institutions and especially the universities, we referred to university and tertiary-educated graduates as the intellectually trained. In the years following the Second World War there had been a vast increase in their numbers. Production was being reconstructed in terms of intellectually mediated, as distinct from craft, technique. Professional associations -- whether of pilots, secondary teachers, telecommunications workers or university staff members -- had consolidated, and the Australian Council of Salaried and Professional Associations (ACPSA) had taken root as an umbrella organisation alongside the ACTU. Apart from work and work-associated organisations, the members of the new strata were key agents of the whole transformation of the urban environment and of the settings of everyday life. They were the carriers of a more individuated and post-parochial style of life, a way of living which responded to the openness of the new media, as distinct from the more restrictive rituals of the old middle class.
Arena 5 reported a weekend conference convened to discuss these issues. But rapid changes were in train. Before two more years had passed, protest against the Vietnam War was mounting. The New Left and the counter-culture, based initially amongst the younger members of the expanding new strata, were still in the process of declaring themselves when, across the Western world, the citadels of power were shaken by a social eruption which seemed to come from nowhere.
The intellectuals and the French events
In May 1968, the French students rebelled, masses of citizens joined them on the streets and, at least in the short term, the French government was forced into headlong retreat. As the Age asked at the time, 'Is it as some observers here believe an historic cataclysm heralding social changes so profound that we are only now beginning to catch a glimpse of them?' (30/5/68). Scarcely remembered now, these tumultuous events called to mind the great revolution of 1789. Arena's editors took them to be portents of quite far reaching change.
In their first references to the intellectually trained, it was the Arena editors' intention to differentiate this group from the intellectuals proper -- the creative intellectuals -- by emphasis upon the way they had been trained to work within established modes of representing and taking hold of the real world. By contrast, the intellectuals proper had played an indispensable part in every civilisation, whether as prophets, as interpreters of the reality which provides a setting for the overall way of life, or as articulators of moral orders. But the intellectually related groupings as a whole had not previously assumed a mass which allowed them to take action that might change the whole social order. This was the main significance, for Arena's editors, of the unprecedented events in France.
Beyond that we saw them as providing a practical example that might act as a carrier for an account of the way the intellectually related practices could be understood in an historically novel way, that is, as situated within a distinctive form of life, one which, as far as we knew, had not yet been represented in theoretical terms. We proposed that this distinctive form, of itself, entailed a heightened individuation, honest reporting, a particular mode of mutuality and other traits consistent with a socialist and cooperative mode of life. We took the French events to suggest the emergence of a second setting of socialist aspiration.
Around the Western world, and particularly among the students, these events stimulated a rising tide of protest within the New Left. Arbitrary hierarchy in university government and mass protest against the war in Vietnam were its immediate concerns. The writings of the young Marx coincided with a new spirit which dissociated itself from the crimes of an older socialism while continuing to reach out towards a basic transformation of social life. As Tom Nairn recorded at the time, 'The revolution which is beginning will call in question not only capitalist society but industrial society'. So read a poster pinned to the door of the Sorbonne on 13 May 1968.
With an optimism reinforced with what they took to be their own insights, Arena's immediate circle built their own printery, learned to print and continued to do so for the best part of twenty years. In the immediate setting of the emergence of the New Left, these efforts also overlapped with the election of the Whitlam Labor Government in 1972. With a new broom sweeping out the remnants of Robert Menzies' order of things, doors opened more easily to the new strata. Along with the New Left they re-entered the mainstream. Earlier hopes were put on hold.
They settled down into a recognition that, in the new conditions, what we termed a cultural politics linked to issues more basic than economic interests alone, was likely to mark the way to any renewal of equalitarian and cooperative hopes within the broader community. The social movements, however, which had assumed such prominence in this period, were uncertain vehicles of social change. Tending towards single issue politics, they shared something of an oppositional sensibility, but where this underpinned specific objectives, as in the women's movement, these were often limited to equality within the given order of things. Only rare individuals within the social movements saw that their aspirations might be extended towards a more general transformation. There was not then, just as there is not now, any clear sense of a need to reconstruct the institutions to achieve a basic breakaway from the 'mind-forged manacles' of resurgent capital.
The corralling of any larger sense of possibility had begun with the restrictive scope of the reforming enthusiasm of the Whitlam years. Hopes of far reaching social transformation were firmly put to rest for the immediate future by the constitutional coup d'etat which ended the Whitlam government. Eight years more of Coalition government under Malcolm Fraser was in no way a period of revival.
In the first years of the upsurge of the New Left, Arena's propositions about the intellectually related groupings achieved some degree of crossover from the pages of our periodical to the self-consciousness of a movement. Others dubbed these propositions the 'Arena Thesis' and that stereotype was still around among some people for at least twenty years after the magazine acknowledged that, back in the sixties, its editors had overdosed on honey-dew.
Quite apart from any 'Arena Thesis', the argument based upon the distinctive social form of intellectual practice remained a basic characteristic of Arena's editorial perspective. As the Fraser years were followed once again by the return of Labor, first under Hawke and then Keating, we worked through the implications of the intellectually trained having become core personnel of the emergence of a type of society which had found a new way of holding together a populace within a shared cultural frame. Given the break-up of the class solidarities of high modernity, given that the 'death of God' had gone public, the great majority of people had begun to live for the moment. By way of the treadmill of consumerism on the one hand, and the sense of freedom which emancipation from the parochialism of the old middle class produced on the other, they could now build an affluent lifestyle which, relative to the past, allowed a more autonomous citizenry to turn their thoughts away from the longer term prospects of this way of living.
Throughout this period some whose way of seeing was still framed by the too exclusive preoccupation with economic interests which had contributed to the stultification of orthodox marxism, took this process of accommodation as confirmation of their own certitudes. For an extended period, the editors responded to that point of view in public discussion and in the pages of the magazine. Our standpoint was that, for those who had eyes to see, a far more extended transformation than had been envisaged within the terms of labour and capital was now under way. We felt that the task for our generation was to begin to comprehend and to act within that enlargement of the understanding.
Solidarity, insight, ambiguities
Throughout the period when we worked together to produce the magazine ourselves, the bonds of mutual support, now extended and reinforced by common endeavour, insulated us to a degree from disillusionment, passivity or simple compliance. These were the understandable responses of many of our peers as the market far more actively reached into every institution. But insulation and, with that, isolation, can also lead to a degree of unresponsiveness. In our case, we did acknowledge that the incorporation of the intellectually related groupings was a substantial reality, but we also saw it as ambiguous. The other side of being drawn into the mainstream was a widespread malaise which, among some, prompted active support for the more defined objectives of one or more of the proliferating social movements. Nevertheless, we were preoccupied with the relative muteness of many activists at the level of ideas and especially with their inability to spell out a unified critical overview. We felt ourselves more able to do so. To a degree we were still hooked on the idea that, by direct comprehension, members of the intellectually related groupings might be able to grasp what we took to be the transformative implications of their own distinctive form of life. In radically new circumstances we wanted to further explore the possibility that the dissemination of a theoretical overview might find a strong response among the new strata. Could it act as the bridge into the reconstruction of everyday practicality?
Unavoidable as it may well have been at this stage, this focus upon theoretical overview tended to divert attention away from the continuing, if slow build-up within the ground of the social movements of an only half-articulate but critical sensibility. Still hoping for the crystallisation within the new strata of a critical overview which, in some degree, 'fitted' our analysis, we had been slow to fully appreciate a massive, if still amorphous response slowly emerging as if from underground.
The intellectual practices had reconstructed everyday life. People were beginning to vote with their feet. Yet some were starting to recognise too, as if intuitively and bodily, as distinct from theoretically, the path they were treading. We were in no way faced with the need to revise our emphasis upon the role of the intellectually related groupings. But we did need to more actively recognise that their indirect effects were manifested in the whole way of life.
A significant break from the marxist tradition
Quite apart from any immediate interpretive force of Arena's theoretical propositions, those relating to intellectuals denoted a significant break from the marxist tradition of social analysis. We were saying that the capacity of the intellectuals to 'stand outside' lay in the fact that their distinctive mode of interconnection, via print, abstracted them from the social relations comprising the main body of society. In the substantive and practical sense of abstraction, it lifted them out of these relations. It constituted a special 'form of life' which carried distinctive ethical promptings that were by no means consistent with the 'dog eat dog' promptings of the market.
Under conditions where the market actually drew intellectual technique into the field of production, it was widely taken to supercharge the historical role of capital. The sense of a neo-liberal continuity almost completely eclipsed the fact that it also gave rise to unexamined consequences. We held that the conditions of human life as such, as distinct from material interests in the distribution of the social product, were affected so that the whole culture began to move into a phase of transformation. In effect a post-capitalist society was emerging while, in the short term, the scope of that shift was concealed by the extended reach of the market and the collateral extension of a fetishised sense of reality.
Nuclear power, biotechnology, the range of issues raised by the Greens: all of these developments are drawn into history and social being through the agency of the intellectually related groupings. Certainly they are all affected by class interests, but they cannot be totally encompassed within a structural perspective. These developments raise questions which are not only concerned with the fate of humanity but with the radical transformation of human nature as such. By focusing upon the issue of the social form of intellectuality, by attempting to draw it into history, by arguing that it was abstracted from and reached across other forms of life, we were bringing the recognition of ideal values down to earth. Moreover, by suggesting that universal ideas, including moral norms, were articulated, as distinct from wholly constituted, within a particular level of social reality, we were suggesting that the social whole was an ensemble of different levels of abstraction. Hence, we were pointing to how human nature itself, as a social emergent, might be theorised without the grounding assumption of a human essence, which, of itself, is so often taken to be beyond the scope of theory.
We believed that as long as human nature was taken as given, was outside theoretical understanding, there could be no clear recognition of when it was being undermined. This, we suggested, was progressing by way of a wholesale assimilation of direct interchange with nature, and of human beings with one another, to a commodity market, the reach of which was now radically extended by the fusion of instrumental rationality with capital.
Complementing that expansion of the market, and by the agency of the intellectually related groupings, the whole fabric of everyday life was itself being abstracted and commodified. Given that all of this was the main trajectory, there nevertheless stood, over against it, a widespread murmuring of dissent. The social movements took up and gave definite expressions to various aspects of this stirring at the grassroots. There was a shared sense of the need to protest in the name of a fuller life, but just how that was to be realised remained obscure. Were they seeking a freer space for individuals and groups within the system or did they point beyond it and towards a radical reconstruction of the institutions and personal life? Whatever its potentials, only rare figures within this whole movement could themselves articulate an alternative overview or seemed likely to respond to such an overview if it emerged at some other level of the social whole. We came to see this whole two-sided process as the emergence of a cultural contradiction which, in its manifold expressions -- inside and outside electoral politics, and locally as well as globally -- would frame the future of social life.
A cultural contradiction
General insights, overviews, whatever their validity, have a power of possessing those who adopt them. No doubt too, intellectuals have a special readiness to believe that ideas alone can effect social change. Whatever the reasons, there is little doubt that, particularly after the New Left was drawn back into the mainstream, after that reintegration was consolidated within the Hawke consensus, Arena's editors were faced with a new situation. There was a more marked indifference to and incomprehension of their editorial perspective. As if to complement the heightened individuation of the new strata, the openness of the media society and the proliferation of individual career paths, a whole new way of viewing the social world had taken hold.
Discourse theory, the linguistic turn, the dissolution of the substantive force of the objective, in the face of the fluidity of the sign: perhaps it was significant that this new way of knowing and of guiding action also had its roots in France. Incongruously in one sense, understandably in another, it was the intellectual expression of the new consensus. In the aftermath of high modernity, wherein abstracted networks of information presented a different phenomenology of the real, the radical stance of the 'new philosophers' could be naively equated with a means of continuity for the Left.
In an intellectual sense Arena's editors were well placed to respond to this challenge. They saw the social form of intellectual practice and its now far more direct engagement with a changing world as its point of departure. It was as if that once quite restricted form of life had entered into, was being made flesh within, the whole body of society. In close conjunction with the process, the Arena editors recognised that the instrumental form of higher learning complemented the discursive fluidity of the media promotions which drove the new affluence.
In response, the editors prepared substantial theoretical articles critiquing such figures as Lyotard and Foucault, along with others prominent in feminist theory. They pointed out that their work, which claimed universal scope, represented only one abstracted level of the social whole. It was doubly distorted. It concealed its own abstracted character and obscured the incompatibility, and indeed the very existence, of other levels of the social which were incompatible with its template. Arena presented this newly surging current within intellectual work as enlightening in restricted ways. Overall, we noted its operation as a meta-ideology: a 'grand narrative' in an historically new expression which paradoxically denied all grand narratives and hence saw its own role simply as liberating, as distinct from a new mode of control with the potential to draw people towards the post-human condition. Partly because of their preoccupation with a particular approach to the development of an overview, in part as well because the linguistic turn was a sea-change within the history of intellectual life, Arena's editors were slow to face up to the degree to which discourse theory had begun to run in harness with some of the social movements.
Nevertheless, it pressed upon us further development of our theoretical concerns which led a new generation of very able and dedicated people to join our editorial circle. Throughout the post-Whitlam years and then on into the years of the new consensus we elaborated our standpoint, we also held small conferences, ran public meetings and generally carried on our role of providing a platform for the Left. Beyond that, faced with the intensification of the threat of nuclear war, we developed a major street theatre project which effectively brought home to large numbers of people its elemental threat to the future of humanity.
A major reorganisation
When Arena, as a quarterly magazine, had reached its one-hundredth issue, we closed this first series and launched a new bi-monthly magazine along with a bi-annual scholarly journal. This was both a major step and a halfway house in an effort to reach a broader public. This major step entailed basing almost our whole operation in the city, as well as reconstituting our printing activities in both technical and social terms. Changing expectations in the population at large had faced us with the need to embrace the graphics revolution. The demands of producing two publications meant that employment replaced voluntary cooperation in the actual process of production.
A redeployment of our resources on these lines had the effect of winding down the wider sphere of practical cooperation within which our editorial activity had been set. Our long period of comprehensive cooperation had fed back into the sphere of theory by way of the solidarity, the mutual respect and the sharing of ideas that working against the prevailing current requires. In a period when the new individuation could become the new individualism, it was especially important. At the same time, as already suggested, too much withdrawal into one's own circle can create a certain blindness. Especially among intellectuals, it can mean failure to see that general ideas alone can achieve only quite limited results in a period which lacks a broad or spontaneous movement rejecting the ruling consensus.
We were still a halfway house
In launching the two publications we had hoped and said that we wanted them to cross-fertilise. Given the limited results of our early efforts to convey our standpoint to a wider public we made two more major efforts with something of that end in view.
When the US began beating NATO's war drum at the time of the Kosovo crisis we brought out a special issue of the magazine. It analysed the unfolding events and sponsored a very well-attended and at times rancorous forum. This was followed by an interchange in the pages of the magazine. It was an advance, but our own limited resources and the relative compliance within the public realm could allow only a toehold, not yet a foothold.
With Arena Journal, rather than the magazine, as a point of departure, in 2002 we attempted a somewhat comparable venture. Concentrating upon the university as a central institution of the intellectuals proper, we published an issue of the journal in book form, Scholars and Entrepreneurs, and subsequently joined with other prominent sponsors in a full-day conference wherein several core contributions took up the theme of the social form of intellectual practice. No doubt we made some small contribution to launching a wider discussion of the social form of intellectual practice and its role in contemporary cultural change. But the overall conclusion was that the university, as a critically interpretive institution, was now relatively inert. Only a few of the scholars were facing the scale of the changes which had engulfed their own tradition.
The human essence
To stand outside in any effective way is to include 'theorising' what is typically taken for granted in the very act of theory. In short, to point to the distinctive form of intellectual practice alone is, from the point of view of theory as such, to stop at a halfway house. To go beyond that point is to ask how the levels of being -- from which theory, as conventionally conceived, abstracts -- are themselves constituted. Most important of all is to ask how basic sociality is itself constituted.
In a general sense we had raised this issue many years before. It was inseparable from the notion of the social whole being composed of levels of being which were themselves constituted at different levels of abstraction. At the point of interface with nature, we held that the limiting conditions of our human nature were set by the reciprocal processes of give and take within the immediate family, within the wider ties of kinship, and often within friendship as well. These regulated in social terms the imperatives set within the need to sustain life as such.
We held that a cultural contradiction arose when the radical abstraction of social life, as made possible by science-based technologies, began to cut away and to take up into its own modalities, the reciprocal processes which are at the root of sociality as such. While stating this in theoretical terms, we could not as yet give adequate recognition to the fact that, for the vast majority of people, a cultural contradiction of this scope was far from explicit. They did not recognise it as a central feature of their own lives within the whole society. On the contrary, they were contained within a new consensus which deflected any critical overview and certainly fell far short of any explicit recognition of a cultural contradiction. But containment could not entirely damp down every aspect of an elemental stirring within the sense of being. That is, a sense that the natural world was receding, that the roots of what had been taken for granted as the fixed reference points of human nature were being put in question. Among the social movements, the Greens certainly give some recognition to this shift in their special concern for the environment. In a practical sense they are by far the closest approach to an alternative. Yet they do not effectively relate the way in which the bio-technological exploration of the human body can be tied to that broad agenda within which the 'conquest of nature' turns back upon itself. Nor do they sufficiently emphasise that the technological assault upon the environment is only a single issue within a total reworking of the context of social life. That cannot be grasped as long as people simply take for granted any version at all of their 'human nature'. Clearly the early stages of a more comprehensive understanding are often intuitive and as likely to respond to the poetic imagination as to rational argument. The argument here, however, is emphatically a social one. It asserts that the mooring points of 'the natural' are limited by, as distinct from set within, the natural world. Their actual setting is social: that is, first of all within the reciprocal processes whereby human beings take hold of nature and of one another as they lift themselves into a cultural medium of life; beyond that, in the way the whole range of institutions contribute to how the intellectual practices, especially, articulate that engagement. They generalise it as 'human nature' and then take it for granted as if given.
A more complete roadmap
All this is to speak of the reflective fine-tuning of a politics of culture. Particularly in regard to the erosion of sociality, it is to point towards ways in which small areas of renewed cooperation and community effort can be both tied to electoral politics and to an overview which can begin to lend a sense of possibility to the reconstruction of social life.
Given its cultural perspective, Arena has always been politically engaged. Now, as a different world of intense conflict emerges, a cultural perspective is doubly indispensable. Issues which were once viewed as national or local are far more actively drawn into a global frame. Within that extended frame, the treadmills of affluent progress within the 'enlightened' states leave the destruction of traditional cultures in their wake. Within the mainstream, the cure on offer is free trade held in place by 'coercive democracy'.
Arena had its beginnings within the political intensity of the Cold War. It is our belief that the global and local expressions of the massive cultural transformation which now affects every way of life will take on an intensity which far exceeds that of earlier years. Our publications have not always succeeded in being close to the immediate and day-to-day terms of political contestation. On present indications that period is ending: the centre of contestation is beginning to shift in our direction.
