Arena (Australian publishing co-operative)

Arena is an independent Australian radical and critical publishing group. It has been publishing continuously since 1963. Currently, its principal publications are the political and cultural Arena Magazine (6 times per year), and the twice-yearly theoretical publication Arena Journal. Their concerns initially found expression in the practical and theoretical quarterly, Arena, which ran from 1963 to 1992 and was then transformed into the two different publications that continue today.

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. 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.

The quarterly journal Arena was founded in Melbourne, Australia in 1963, at a time of crisis for the Old Left and the emergence of the New Left. Some members of the editorial board, who at that time still hoped for a theoretical and ethical renewal within far Left in Australia, were members of the Party. As that prospect waned Arena continued as an independent critical political publication.

Although the publication covered a wide variety of topics, one was of key practical and theoretical importance: the transformation of post-World War II industrial society by the mobilisation of knowledge production as a core productive activity, the nature of intellectual practice, and the consequent creation of new class and cultural divisions whose social character made necessary a thorough revision of the classical Marxist theory of class and base and superstructure accounts of the social whole.

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