Shakespeare versus the bus ticket

These are big questions, and they show us that the tram ticket, if we pay it some serious attention, is a fascinating text. It reveals to us, in miniature, a correlation between two techniques by which populations are governed: on the one hand, the physical infrastructure of transport routes, schedules, fees, and the like; and on the other hand, a moral infrastructure of beliefs and values, presented as a body of shared wisdom and delivered through the official voice of government instrumentalities.

In the tram ticket, these two forces of government go hand in hand. If we accept for a moment that such an analysis provides a revealing and sophisticated perspective on the world we inhabit, then we should conclude that Cultural Studies has something interesting to offer us.

Now let us consider what such cultural “scientists” see when they turn their attention to Shakespeare. Amazingly, perhaps, from the very "detached" perspective of Cultural Studies, the works of Shakespeare begin to look eerily similar to the tram ticket.

Shakespeare's plays and sonnets are valued by society for their aesthetic and moral qualities. And, like the moral aphorism on my tram ticket, they are disseminated to the population largely through the regulatory instruments of government - in this case, schools, curricula, syllabuses, textbooks and examinations, which collectively specify who is to read the plays, when, and why.

Like the tracks of the Glenelg tram, the tracks of the school curriculum are laid down by government, as part of a vast program for the management of the state and its population. The very word "curriculum" is Latin for "running-track”, and schooling can be viewed as a long tram ride in which students must make certain stops (learning to spell; solving quadratic equations) in their journey toward technical and moral proficiency as a citizen.

Reading Shakespeare is one of the popular stops that governments like to include on the educational journey, for much the same reason that the South Australian Government prints moral aphorisms on the back of its tram tickets: that is, because government has an investment in the moral regulation of its citizenry.

Nobody should pretend that this way of looking at Shakespeare's work exhausts the meaning of the plays. It barely scratches the surface. But it is a legitimate way of thinking about the plays as cultural objects, and it reveals some of the limitations of a purely literary approach, which tends to ignore the “governmental deployment” of texts in favour of aesthetic considerations.

That is the point that theorists like Eagleton have in mind when they make comparisons between reading works of literature and reading other cultural objects; and it is part of the thinking that lies behind some of the new school curricula, which give students scope to study a wide range of texts beyond the literary. The brief example above gives us a taste of what they might do with those texts.

The question, then, is not really about whether our students should read Shakespeare or bus tickets. The question is about what game we think they should be learning to play in high school: Literary Criticism, or Cultural Studies. It is about which discipline we think offers the most appropriate ideas and tools to students who have to live in the complex social and cultural spaces that have evolved in the 21st century.

There is no reason why they cannot do both; or neither. But, at present, the argument is being confused by a false assumption that the choice is between good or bad “standards”, progress or regression, civilisation or decay. That's not it at all. If we frame the debate in those terms, we are arguing about apples and oranges. Cultural Studies is not an inferior form of Literary Criticism; it is a different game, though equally sophisticated and literate.

What complicates the debate is that both disciplines - Literary Criticism and Cultural Studies - have made very big claims for themselves. Both have, in their own ways, claimed to offer universal truths about the world. And each uses its own (limited) tools and techniques to puncture the claims made by the other.

Criticism uses its belief in moral absolutes to accuse Cultural Studies of moral relativism; Cultural Studies uses its "scientific" detachment to accuse Literary Criticism of promoting the narrow values of privileged groups (the "dead white British males" of the literary canon).

They are both right, within limits. But if we are to get anywhere in the discussion, we need to stop relying on specious caricatures and instead engage with the issues more seriously. In Australia, we hear more detailed and subtle analyses of football games than we have heard in recent discussions of education. We can and must do better.