Thesis Eleven recent issues

Introduction: Colonial Liberalism and Western Marxism -- Remarx From Melbourne

Beilharz, P., Bennetts, D., Ellem, C. — 2008-10-20

The Social Sciences in Australia: an Unrequited Instrumentalism

Macintyre, S. — 2008-10-20

Australian universities expanded rapidly in the period after the Second World War, assisted by the national government and with a clear understanding that they would serve national purposes. Social scientists sought to participate in the enhanced opportunities for research by pressing their relevance to the nation-building project. At the same time they sought academic recognition as research disciplines by stressing the objective and authoritative character of their knowledge. This article explores the way these strategies were pursued in Australia and the United States, and suggests their consequences. The institutionalization of the social sciences in the university is contrasted with the oppositional social science practised in the labour movement's independent working-class education in the early part of the 20th century, and it is argued that the expectations created by state support of research in the social sciences — and the policies imposed to serve them — are ill founded.

Equality and Exclusion: the Racial Constitution of Colonial Liberalism

Lake, M. — 2008-10-20

In his path-breaking study, A Colonial Liberalism: The Lost World of Three Victorian Visionaries (1991), Stuart Macintyre makes a case for the distinctiveness of colonial liberalism and its local habitat, with liberals' insistence on the principle of political equality and the democratic right of self-government. Macintyre's three visionaries — Higinbotham, Pearson and Syme — were also leading crusaders against Chinese immigration, which peaked in Victoria in the 1850s, the decade in which self-government and manhood suffrage were introduced. The local habitat wore a racial aspect. In this essay I suggest that it was precisely the democratic ideal of equality, espoused in the context of Chinese immigration and colonial nation-building, that led to the insistence on racial exclusion. Colonial liberals called for racial exclusion because of, not in spite of, their commitment to democracy. The apparent paradox of a policy of exclusion promoted in the name of equality was, I suggest, definitive of the project of colonial liberalism.

The Poverty of Liberalism: the First Old Age Pensions in Australia

Murphy, J. — 2008-10-20

The two reforms that most contributed to the idea of an antipodean social laboratory at the end of the 19th century were the old age pension and state arbitration of the minimum wage. Both are said to reflect the influence of the new liberalism, buttressed by the emergence of the labour movement into politics. This paper argues that debates on the old age pension at the turn of the 19th century illustrate a more tangled set of liberal trajectories than either a narrative of a unified Deakinite consensus, or of a new liberal importation, would allow. While there was clearly some new liberal influence in how New South Wales debated the pension, in Victoria an older tradition of colonial liberalism — which emphasized self-governance as much as social reform — meant that it was seen as much as a reward for good moral character as a measure to deal with poverty.

Reframing Majoritarian National Identities Within an Antipodean Perspective

Pearson, D. — 2008-10-20

Arguing for the merits of an antipodean perspective that embraces the linked historical and current relations between Tasman, British and other worlds, this paper focuses on the majoritarian responses of those of English ancestry in Britain and within the British diaspora to wide ranging changes that potentially challenge their national supremacy in both contexts. After briefly assessing some of the approaches to exploring the identities of the 'English/ British' separately in Australia and New Zealand, some suggestions are made about how majoritarian narratives are best reframed, conceptually and methodologically, both within the antipodes and the broader contexts within which they have always been placed. The adoption of an antipodean perspective is deemed necessary in order to understand how changes in majority status and shifts in national identity are mutually constituted within and across the above worlds.

Australian Settlements

Beilharz, P. — 2008-10-20

The idea of the 'Australian settlement' has been normalized since its popularization by Paul Kelly into the Keating years. This essay responds further to existing discussion of the idea, including attempts to develop it by expanding its descriptive and analytic criteria. It argues for the pluralization of the idea of settlement, rather than for attempts to develop the 'Australian settlement' by adding further exhaustive detail. The real challenge, beyond the controversy, is the adequate specification of the conditions of Australian modernity. Here the idea and institution of arbitration remains central.

The Uses and Abuses of Gramsci

Davidson, A. — 2008-10-20

Antonio Gramsci is today the most translated Italian theorist. His theory has been used extensively in English language publications in cultural studies and international relations. This article examines the use, abuse and fruitful additions to Gramsci of Stuart Hall, Edward Saïd, Ranajit Guha, Robert Cox, Stephen Gill and Adam Morton. Its object is to examine their fidelity to what the mainstream Italian philology of Gramsci has written about his concepts and their order.

Between Zhdanov and Bloomsbury: the Poetry and Poetics of E. P. Thompson

Hamilton, S. — 2008-10-20

E. P. Thompson's poetry and poetics are rarely considered by commentators on his work, but they are central to his thought. Thompson, who for a long time identified as a poet rather than a historian, struggled to find an alternative to both the Bloomsburian modernism he associated with decadent British capitalism and the chilly philistinism of Stalinist socialist realism. Thompson's unique and ingenious poetics emphasizes the political nature of poetry, yet denies that poets ought to subordinate their work to political concerns. By understanding Thompson's poetics, we can understand his critique of the 'positivism and utilitarianism' which he came to believe were inherent in most forms of Marxism. Thompson's poetics also helps us to understand the peculiar forms that some of his most famous political polemics take.

Thesis Eleven Centre 2007 Annual Report

2008-10-20

Greg Dening Remembered

Isaac, R. — 2008-10-20

Review Essay: The Lost World of Marvelous Melbourne

Bennetts, D. — 2008-10-20

Review Essay: Labour in the Margins: Reconsidering the Labour Experiment

Ellem, C. — 2008-10-20

Review: Thomas Klikauer, Communication and Management at Work (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007)

Wilson, S. — 2008-10-20

Review: Katya Mandoki, Everyday Aesthetics: Prosaics, the Play of Culture and Social Identities (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007)

Corballis, T. — 2008-10-20

Introduction

Roberts, D., Smith, K., Marginson, S., Beilharz, P. — 2008-07-25

Theological History and the Legitimacy of the Modern Social Sciences: Considerations on the Work of Hans Blumenberg

Harrington, A. — 2008-07-25

This article explores the much neglected work of the German philosopher and cultural theorist Hans Blumenberg, a figure still relatively little known in the Anglophone world. The thesis is defended that Blumenberg's conception of The Legitimacy of the Modern Age (1966) offers valuable resources for addressing some important questions about the philosophical self-understanding of the modern social sciences in relation to theological and religious sources of thought and language. The article begins with an assessment of the contemporary relevance of Blumenberg's critique of the idea of modern scientific culture as a merely `secularized form' of theological thinking. This critique is then compared with Blumenberg's account of the relationship of theoretico-scientific inquiry to mythological consciousness in his second major philosophical monograph of 1979, Work on Myth. The article concludes with a range of reflections on ways in which Blumenberg's work helps us understand how certain explanatory constructs and devices employed in the modern social sciences can be said to incorporate, assimilate, and at the same time critically transform figures of thought and language that display a mythic, religious and theological context of historical origination, provenance or genealogy.

The Closing of the Civic Mind: Marcel Gauchet on the `Society of Individuals'

Braeckman, A. — 2008-07-25

According to Gauchet we are living in a `society of individuals'. But a central term is missing from that formula, and not by any accident, for contemporary society has lost it from view: the term of the political. In sum, thus reads Gauchet's diagnosis, society today is haunted by a kind of individualism out of which no society can be conceived, as it obfuscates its political dimension. The aim of this article is to elaborate this diagnosis, and more specifically the idea that there is no society, and therefore no individual either, without the political. In order to do so, I will explore the meaning of the formula `society of individuals'. Within the scope of this analysis, I shall primarily pay attention to the `primacy of the political' in Gauchet. To conclude, I will assess Gauchet's diagnosis, by fathoming in what sense contemporary individualism, besides being an `eclipse of the political', is also a threat to democracy.

Sovereignty, Governance and the Political: The Problematic of Foucault

Singer, B. C. J., Weir, L. — 2008-07-25

Contemporary Foucauldian research assimilates the political with governance. This formulation dates to Foucault's emphasis on the significance of the anti-Machiavellians in introducing the concept of governance into political theory. Returning to Machiavelli, we argue that early modern political theory was instead characterized by the simultaneous problematization of ruler and ruled, and the co-constitution of sovereignty and governance. We then outline the relation of ruler and ruled in the political structure of the democratic sovereign. Concepts of both sovereignty and governance are necessary to theorize the political in modernity, including the dangers that arise from fusing sovereignty and governance, as occurred during the Nazi period in Germany, when the distinction between the sovereign people and the governed population was conflated.

On Paul Ricoeur and the Translation-- Interpretation of Cultures

Garcia, L. Ma. — 2008-07-25

This article presents Paul Ricoeur's ideas about translation in view of giving some guidelines for the interpretation of cultures. Ricoeur's `hermeneutics of the self', which stresses the creativity of capable human being, has its source in a conviction of the superabundance of sense over the abundance of nonsense. It is the problem of the transmission of meaning from one language to another, from one culture to another that gives impetus to his preoccupation with translation. Ricoeur's radical astonishment before the plurality of languages and cultures and his deep conviction about `communication' among human beings made him realize the urgent `task of translation' that is accompanied by a `task of morning'. If translation is the paradigm of all exchanges, its practice can provide us some guidelines in the dialogue of cultures. First, one must courageously open oneself to the `test' of the Other, to welcome difference and respect it as unsurpassable. Second, one must wager on the possibility of an `equivalence without identity', to take a non-hierarchical view of cultures. Third, one must undertake the `task of mourning', to learn to narrate otherwise, to interpret otherwise.

Academic Entrepreneurship and the Creative Economy

Peters, M. A., Besley, T. — 2008-07-25

This article explores the relationships between several notions: the `creative economy'; New Growth Theory and the primacy of ideas; academic entrepreneurship; and the new paradigm of cultural production. Broadly conceptualized, the creative economy links the primacy of ideas in both arts and sciences in a more embedded and social framework of entrepreneurship which positions education as central, since its institutions are the primary knowledge institutions that provide the conditions for the transmission and development of new ideas. Entrepreneurship develops within networks that use new information and communication technologies. The role of the arts, humanities and social sciences becomes re-profiled as crucial in the generation of new ideas within the creative economy, moving discussion and analysis away from a single focus on Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) and the hard sciences such that the redesign of institutional/academic environments is necessary in order to capitalize on ideas and move from creativity to systems of innovation.

On Budapest School Aesthetics: An Interview with Agnes Heller

Fu Qilin, — 2008-07-25

Ghettos and Anti-Ghettos: An Anatomy of the New Urban Poverty

Wacquant, L. — 2008-07-25

Review Essay: Laughter From the Lifeworld: Hans Blumenberg's Theory of Nonconceptuality

Savage, R. — 2008-07-25

Review: Nathalie Karagiannis and Peter Wagner (eds), Varieties of World-Making: Beyond Globalization (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2007)

el-Ojeili, C. — 2008-07-25

Review: Sanjay Seth, Subject Lessons: The Western Education of Colonial India (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007)

Anand, D. — 2008-07-25

Introduction

Roberts, D. — 2008-04-08

The Greek Foundations of the West

Carroll, J. — 2008-04-08

This article returns to the question of the foundations of Western culture. Many have trod this path before, notably Nietzsche. At issue is a theory of culture, and the classical Greek preoccupation with how humans can make sense of their lives, find direction and some sort of vindication — for that is what culture is, and does. Travelling Greece today, what surprises is the vitality of the ancient sites. Alive with their own cast of timeless enchantment, it is as if they haven't changed over the millennia. Has this miraculous, enduring vitality something to do with the fact that the Western tree that Greece seeded continues to flourish? Or, is this just romantic illusion, a way to redeem the prosaic orders of modern everyday life; or, a fantasy aesthetico-religious culture to populate the disenchanted ruins of the Christian churchyard?

Governance, Hubris, and Justice in Modern Tragedy

Lambropoulos, V. — 2008-04-08

Hubris is a notion that has recently acquired special urgency, as it seems to express in the post-communist era the demands of justice during the tragic clash between governance and violence. This ethico-political notion deserves to be studied not only in ancient writings but in modern drama and thought as well. Nikos Kazantzakis' unduly neglected Capodistria (1944) dramatizes the dilemmas of civic action during the democratic constitution of a polity. A reading of this tragedy from the perspective of political theory suggests ways in which the meaning of hubris in modernity may be better understood.

Aristotle and Us: Some Observations on His Philosophical Language

Karalis, V. — 2008-04-08

The study discusses Aristotle's special use of Greek language as a historical construct defined by the need to accommodate the communicative needs of an expanding world (morphoplastic synapses). It addresses the paradoxical synthesis of Platonic idealism and empirical cognition which is expressed in his philosophical language and detects a deep incommensurability in their structural form. It argues that such conflict of paradigms in the work of Aristotle neutralized the interpretive potential of Greek language which focused on commentaries over a long period of time. Aristotle's thinking became important in Thomas Aquinas' philosophical summa by establishing a creative synthesis through the potentialities of Latin. The semantic neutralization of Greek continued until the 20th century when Cornelius Castoriadis proposed a new Aristotelian synthesis by re-interpreting his principle of imagination within a modern understanding of creativity.

The Gods of Greece: Germans and the Greeks

Heller, A. — 2008-04-08

The German relationship to the Greeks was central to German self-understanding. It defined German identity culturally through the exclusion of democracy from the idealized image of Greece and through the emphasis on Greek originality that served to devalue the Roman, Latin and Renaissance translations of the Greek heritage. Hostility to the legacy of the Latin spirit, to legal thought and to rationality, reinforced the German rejection of French intellectual and cultural hegemony. These German fictions about the Greeks were closely linked with reflections on modernity, the death of the Christian God and a disenchanted Cartesian universe. They led Nietzsche and Heidegger to more `original' interpretations of the Greeks as the source of German rebirth.

Nature's God: Emerson and the Greeks

Murphy, P. — 2008-04-08

This article explores the mystical impulse in the American mind, reflected in the work of William James, Kenneth Burke, and most especially the case of Ralph Waldo Emerson. The parallels and differences between Emerson's mystical idea of Nature and the ancient Greek pre-Socratic idea of the universe as a union of opposites are explored. The divergence between the Americans and the Greeks concerning the idea of limits is reflected on. The optimism of the Americans is explained as a function of their mystical theodicy, and the greatness of their power as a function of their mystic ability, so well assayed by Emerson, to bear crushing paradoxes with a cheerful lightness of being.

Greek Exercises: the Modern Olympics as Hellenic Appropriation and Reinvention

Ruprecht, L. A. — 2008-04-08

`From Aristotle to Us', the conference held at La Trobe University in May 2007, names a powerful and highly influential Romantic trajectory, one which posits a particular conception of the ancients, a particular conception of the moderns, and a complex conception of the relationship between the two. Using the modern Olympic Revival as a case study and a case in point, this article argues that such `exercises' in Greek appropriation always operate with largely unstated assumptions about the nature of the present's relation to the past, and the enormously complex quality of the Greek past. In becoming self-critical about such appropriations of the Classical legacy, contemporary critics are forced to contend with the spectre of religion, a topic that `Greek exercises' almost inevitably carve in high relief. The article concludes with an historiographic meditation on varying images of `paganism' in contemporary culture, images that link the Greeks to athletics to such modern and post-modern `revivals'.

Reclaiming Antiquity Within the Spaces of Disciplinarity

David, L. S. — 2008-04-08

Foucault's account of the shift from the sovereign, or juridical, to the disciplinary mode of power produces an understanding of the operations of power cast in terms of individuals' imbeddedness within networks of dependencies specified by `norms' that measure individual performance according to the principles of equivalency (solidarity) and difference (`ab-normality'). Individuals, therefore, must not understand themselves as finally ensnared or trapped by the specific distribution of power within which they find themselves. Under determinate conditions and according to precise strategies, they can always modify power's grip upon themselves. Foucault finds interesting prototypes for this in the ethical practices of ancient Greece that, in his view, satisfied the human desire for rules and form at the same time that they gave scope to the human impatience for liberty. Foucault turns to them in his late work, believing that they may have something to offer in place of modern moral philosophy.

Review Essay: Righting the Self, and Writing God: Anne Carson, Decreation: Poetry, Essays, Opera (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005)

Ruprecht, L. A. — 2008-04-08

Review Essay: `No, We Have Not Finished Reflecting On Communism':1 Beyond Post-Socialism: Sebastian Budgen, Stathis Kouvelakis and Slavoj Zizek (eds), Lenin Reloaded: Toward a Politics of Truth (Duke University Press, 2007); Cornelius Castoriadis, The Rising Tide of Insignificancy (The Big Sleep) (Available at: http://www.notbored.org/RTI.pdf, 2003); Cornelius Castoriadis, Figures of the Thinkable (Including `Passion and Knowledge') (Available at: http://www.notbored.org/RTI.pdf, 2005); Filip Kovacevic, Liberating Oedipus? Psychoanalysis as Critical Theory (Lexington Books, 2007); Claude Lefort, Complications: Communism and the Dilemmas of Democracy (Columbia University Press, 2007)

el-Ojeili, C. — 2008-04-08

Review: Janina Bauman, Beyond These Walls: Escaping the Warsaw Ghetto -- A Young Girl's Story (Virago Press, 2006)

Supski, S. — 2008-04-08

Review: Daniel Chernilo, A Social Theory of the Nation State: The Political Forms of Modernity beyond Methodological Nationalism (Routledge, 2007)

Beilharz, P. — 2008-04-08

Review: Anthony Burke, Beyond Security, Ethics and Violence: War against the Other (Routledge, 2007)

Monahan, T. — 2008-04-08

Review: David Jeneman, Adorno in America, (University of Minnesota Press, 2007); Alex Thomson, Adorno: A Guide for the Perplexed (Continuum, 2006)

Prosser, H. — 2008-04-08

Introduction

Smith, P. M., Hempenstall, P. — 2008-01-21

The Discovery of Islands and the Stories of Settlement

Tau, T. M. — 2008-01-21

This article is a response to a paper presented to the New Zealand Historical Association in 1991 by J. G. A. Pocock, who suggests that Pakeha (European) settlers are now becoming tangata whenua (people of the land) in the same way that Maori did. The principal idea examined is what an `indigenous' identity means once historical claims have been settled by Maori against the Crown, and whether there is any merit in the term `indigenous'. The article then examines the logic behind the idea of `original occupation' and the assumed rights associated with this concept.

Is There a Good Case for New Zealand Exceptionalism?

Fairburn, M. — 2008-01-21

The upsurge in cultural nationalism in New Zealand has failed to produce a good case that New Zealand is an exceptional society. The reason for this is that New Zealand has not had a chance to develop a culture that is autochthonous in significant respects. New Zealand's domination by the cultures of Britain, Australia and America in the 19th and 20th centuries prevented its history from taking a significantly different path. The lack of autochthony is attributed to the structural effects of physical isolation. Remoteness made its human history unusually short, led it to be exceptionally exposed to the global revolution in transport and communication from the mid-19th century, and severely constrained its population size.

Unsettling Recolonization: Labourism, Keynesianism and Australasia From the 1890s to tHe 1950S

McAloon, J. — 2008-01-21

This paper addresses the now entrenched historiography of the Australian Settlement and New Zealand variations thereof. Against the central premise of this historiography, that a particular regime of domestic insulation and external orientation to the British market constrained development and persisted unchanged until the neo-liberal restructuring of the 1980s, it is argued here that the political economy of the beginning of the 20th century was profoundly destabilized by the Depression. As a result, a new, Keynesian regime was established in New Zealand from the late 1930s and in Australia a few years later. The entrenchment of this regime depended upon adoption by remade conservative parties by the end of the 1940s.

A Celestial Place: Hill Gardening in a Colonial Garden City

Morris, M. — 2008-01-21

Despite an assumption that Christchurch — the Garden City of New Zealand — has historically been viewed as the manifestation of a utopian dream, the experiences of the city's gardeners reveal a variety of sentiments about the meaning of gardens. Hillside gardeners, in particular, tended to see their gardens and their place in them in very different ways from their counterparts on the flat. These hillside gardens were places that allowed for an explicit appreciation of internationalism, localism, and an often spiritual connection with the world at large. They were `celestial', paradisical, and I therefore argue that tropes of utopias and paradise may sit uneasily with each other in colonial discourse. This point requires further attention from historians.

Post-War New Zealand Literary Critique

Smithies, J. — 2008-01-21

For most of the 20th century literature and criticism of literature functioned as central engines of cultural change across the western world. This was especially the case in ex-colonial societies like New Zealand where writers and intellectuals frequently expressed a desire to create sophisticated local cultures which could compete with the foundation societies in Europe. Between 1940 and 1984 New Zealand writers and intellectuals developed a mode of literary criticism which this essay refers to as `Literary Critique' for this very reason. In the absence of well established cultural traditions and a sense that they had a duty to import and indigenise western intellectual thought in order to further the evolution of New Zealand culture, a series of writers wrote often scathing critiques of their culture, using literature as their point of entry. Post-War New Zealand Literary Critique stands as evidence of a provincial, masculine, and angry intellectual culture.

Review Essay: Entanglements: Barbed Wire and Sociology

Matthewman, S. — 2008-01-21

Review Essay: `Unsettling' Settler Society

Bennetts, D. — 2008-01-21

Review: Couze Venn, The Postcolonial Challenge: Towards Alternative Worlds (Sage, 2006); Samir Kassir, Being Arab (Verso, 2006)

el-Ojeili, C. — 2008-01-21

Review: Shaughnessy Bishop-Stall, Down to This: A Year Living with the Homeless (University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, 2007)

Davies, S. — 2008-01-21

Review: Tony Blackshaw, Zygmunt Bauman (Routledge, London 2005); Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Life (Polity Press, Cambridge 2005)

Campain, R. — 2008-01-21