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Making Meta Beaches, or Over the Beach and Far Away.
Amanda Macdonald, Honorary Research Fellow, Department of French and Italian, University of Melbourne| [ Go to this paper in the timetable ] |
How is that "beaches" become "the beach" in cultural commentary, and what are the consequences of that conceptual escapade? If we take Pascal for a cultural commentator in the shape of a philosopher, he must have been one of the first to stage a fundamental problem of power attribution on a beach, which had to be somehow universal. Barthes invoked "the beach" as the paradigm example of the bristlingly significant cultural entity that passes for natural, and somehow that 1950s French national beach has worked perfectly as "the always-forever beach", universal for the cultural commentary of many lands. Greg Dening, the ethnohistorian, has somehow made very specific "beaches" in the Pacific count as the universally ambivalent operator of cross-cultural misunderstanding. These are compellingly generalisable representations for cultural commentary, yet the very compulsion of "going to the beach" is problematic for cultural studies. How may cultural studies negotiate the temptations of "the beach", and the reassignability of the elemental non-descriptness attributed to it, remembering that even popular speech insists on going to "the beach"? If cultural studies is the discipline bound to recognise the specificities of beaches – to really feel the sandy particulars under its critical feet – how may it yet extract tropic value (a value of reassignability) from acknowledgement of specifics? The paper will read back and forth between the objections cultural studies must offer some famous sublimations of beachness, and the critical potentialities of making tropes, not so much "on the beach" as "at the beach", and without getting carried away.
