Arena (Australian Publishing Co-operative) - The 1980s: Post-structuralism, Biotechnology and Exterminism

The 1980s: Post-structuralism, Biotechnology and Exterminism

This practical-theoretical approach led those associated with Arena into a number of key debates and causes of the 1980s. The renewal of a 'hot' Cold War by the Reagan administration and of the nuclear arms race – 'exterminism' in E. P. Thompson's phrase - was analysed as an over-determined consequence of an instrumentalised, maximally abstracted way of life. Advances in medical research such as in-vitro fertilization were given a more critical account, examining the manner in which such technologies were harbingers of a wider cultural contradiction arising from the reconstruction of nature at the molecular biological level.

The newly popular work of postmodernists and post-structuralists like Jean Baudrillard and Jacques Derrida, which argued the simulated and deferred nature of the sign and text, was critically analysed as, in fact, a description of a highly abstracted media society, falsely generalised and transhistoricised.

These and other debates increasingly put the Arena editors in a critical relationship to what remained of the Left, which had enthusiastically embraced the celebration of difference and hybridity as the post-structuralist revolution swept English-speaking humanities departments in the 1980s. Paradoxically, this also led to some on the Left failing to grasp Arena’s standpoint, representing it, too, as an expression of the post-structuralist wave.

Increasingly, Arena’s arguments added up to a critique that was deep-cultural and/or ontological. As the USSR collapsed and capitalism was fully globalised, and as the environmental problem became compelling, it was becoming clear that a global system had developed to such a degree that its basic contradiction was of the possibility of meaningful life itself.