Arena (Australian publishing co-operative)

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Arena is an independent Australian critical and radical publishing cooperative that has been continuously producing writings since its founding in 1963. Established by figures in Australia’s ‘New Left’, Arena is a forum to debate and develop new ideas about society and the world, occupying a unique place in Australian cultural and intellectual life ever since.^[1] Arena’s editors and authors share a commitment to creating a genuinely and fully human society for all—a society that draws on left social and political traditions and a ‘green’ revisioning of the world but goes beyond simple or entrenched versions of those ideas.^[2] Arena is especially interested in how people and communities draw on complex cultural histories and life-ways that may defy the logic of late capitalism, and on which basis the social might be understood anew.^[3]

Though the quarterly Arena commenced as a New Left magazine with a commitment to extending Marxist approaches by developing an account of intellectual practices, its subsequent debates and theoretical work, and engagements with critical theory, media theory, post-structuralism and postmodernism, have led it to develop an approach known as the 'constitutive abstraction' approach.^[4] This is connected to an associated lineage of engaged theory. All of these are underpinned by a preoccupation with the questions of social abstraction, including the abstraction of intellectual practices. They include a special emphasis on the cultural and social contradictions of globalised hi-tech society, which the Arena editors took to be misrepresented within prevailing media theory and post-structuralism.

Many of the themes the Arena group has explored over the decades relate to those raised by writers like Slavoj Žižek, Zygmunt Bauman and Richard Sennett, and, to some degree, writers associated with the Frankfurt School. However, Arena's critique also suggests that many of these authors stop short of a full critique of the ungrounding of contemporary social life by current global/ technological/ media processes.