Politics Now, Now

The essay I want to discuss here was published in the ‘pre-global’ era. I find it telling that Meaghan’s ‘Politics Now: Anxieties of a Petit-Bourgeois Intellectual’, dated 14 July 1985 in its appearance in The Pirate’s Fiancée in 1988, was first published in Intervention in Sydney and shortly afterwards as lead essay in Framework in London: that way people in London would actually be able to read it as well.1 In his introduction, the Framework editor Paul Willemen linked the essay to one of Judith Williamson’s in New Socialist in September 1986, where she had occasion to protest ‘against the prevailing tendency on the British cultural “left” to proclaim the virtues of ideological regimes exemplified by Dallas and Dynasty’.2 These were connections that had to be forged by hand, as it were, rather than simply by clicking a ‘follow’ button on Academia.edu