School of Culture and Communication - Research Publications
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ItemThree Sisters, by Anton Chekhov(Coghill, 1988)
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ItemDiscipline and Discipleship( 1988)The transfer of knowledges is almost always mediated by institutions and by authorized persons. I set up some metaphors in this paper to try to examine these mediating processes by which knowledges are both reproduced and transformed. In particular, I take psychoanalytic andreligious training as metaphors for the transmission of a discipline, and then I briefly extend the figure of discipleship to talk about literary pedagogy and the training of graduate students.
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ItemThe margins of the law( 1988-02)Text reviewed Roberto Mangabeira Unger, The Critical Legal Studies Movement. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986. 128pp. One of the most powerful current readings of the law is that developed, as an “expansion of doctrine” by Roberto Mangabeira Unger. This reading begins with an acceptance of “the mimimal characteristics of doctrine - the willingness to take the extant authoritative materials as starting points and the claim to normative authority” (15). It accepts the historical givenness of doctrine, that is to say; but then pushes on from there to the point where doctrine crosses over into ideological conflict. This is the reading, in other words, of a “double inscription” it explores the “internal development” (2) of legal categories (for example, the causal categories embedded in notions such as imputed purpose), but it then tries to open this development out into a recognition and a deepening of the clash between contradictory principles. Legal categories are so closely tied in with the structure of the world that to contest them, or to elaborate them to the point of contradiction, is to challenge the naturalness and the necessity of that structure. Such a method of reading derives its political force from its belief that “the focussed disputes of legal doctrine repeatedly threaten to escalate into struggles over the basic imaginative structure of social existence”
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ItemThe marks of want and care(McPhee-Gribble, 1988)It is not true that time heals all wounds. Some wounds linger on until the wounded die and their pain is forgotten. A generation of Australians harboured searing memories of the 1890s depression - of hunger, cold, bewilderment, humiliation and fear. But they are gone now, and their memories with them. If the depression is remembered at all, it is for the bank crashes of 1893, which produced panic among the propertied class. The working people and the unemployed who felt the chill most severely left few written records. Here, as in so many other areas of Australian life, the privilege of being remembered, being included in ‘history’, has been open to only a few. But why would anyone want to re-live the sufferings of a dead generation? Perhaps because so many of the institutions we take for granted began as attempts to do something about the effects of the 1890s crisis. Federation, state welfare, arbitration and the rise of the Labor Party all date back to that time. The crisis also ushered in profound changes in family life. As earlier chapters have discussed, the 1890s marked the beginning of the trend towards smaller families, with all that it implies for the way that people organize their lives. If the memory of the 1890s has gone, its legacy is still with us.
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ItemDivers observations on Australians: a historical library( 1988)Now we confront the five reference volumes of Australians: A Historical Library. These books’ very appearance suggests authority: they are weighty, dignified; they fall open without disintegrating; their typography is conservative but highly legible. They’re real books, as opposed to the cheap paperbacks that have perforce become our staple diet. At the same time, they are pitched towards a non-specialist audience. The language is fairly straightforward and they are heavily illustrated, with generous use of colour. Given the ‘slice’ approach adopted in other volumes of this ‘library’, these reference volumes bear a particular load: they have to provide a readily accessible ‘quick fix’ of basic information that will at least fill in the topography of the rest of the cake. To be blunt, taken as a whole they don’t discharge the responsibility very well. While they contain a mass of useful information and embody a lot of good work by a lot of good historians, as a set of reference volumes they have many inadequacies and inconsistencies.
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ItemThe apron-strings of empire(McPhee Gribble, 1988)Historical discussion of Australia's relationship with Britain has generally concentrated on asking who won out. Was Australia, as Humphrey McQueen and others have argued, a 'willing, often over-anxious partner' in the British imperial endeavour, or was it a victim of British exploitation, as radical-nationalist writers have long maintained? Clearly the answers to these questions depend on the questioner's own set of values. There is plenty of evidence to support either case. But we also have to query whether the question is worth asking in the first place.
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ItemRepetition and limitation: computer software and Copyright Law( 1988)The recent evolution of copyright law in the United States is particularly rich in contradictions because of the pressure exerted by new information technologies and by the requirements of an information economy - that is, an economy based in the progressive commodification of information. In so far as this process is mediated through the law relating to intellectual property, it exacerbates the contradiction between the principles of limited monopoly rights and the public availability of ideas.
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ItemSome versions of Foucault: part 2( 1988)In spite of its debt to structuralism, Foucault’s early work may be said to be prestructuralist in one important sense. Whereas one of the central tenets of French structuralism is that energy is an effect of structure, one strand of Foucault’s work up to The Archaeology of Knowledge posits energy and structure as being in a relation of antagonistic opposition: the category of energy is understood, in the framework of a romantic and libertarian tradition deriving from Nietzsche and Bataille, as transgression, as that which subverts structure (but covertly, of course, this also sets up a relation of dependence between the two). This understanding flows fairly directly into an anarchist politics of transgression. This opposition, or something like it, structures John Rajchman’s version of the development of Foucault’s work. Michel Foucault: The Freedom of Philosophy maps Foucault’s course from a romantic literary modernism centred on the experience of language and of madness to a historical nominalism that ceases to privilege literary discourse.
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ItemSome versions of Foucault: part 1( 1988)This essay began as a review of David Hoy's anthology on Foucault, but after reading it I decided that it might be useful to try to cover some of the other recent critical material. The Foucault industry is burgeoning: I read everything I could get hold of in English, but there are doubtless books I've missed, and doubtless others will have come on to the market since this review was completed. With the exception of Habermas's two essays in Der Philosophische Diskurs der Moderne (which shouldshortly be available in translation) I decided to ignore foreign language materials - including, for example, the Foucault issue of Critique and Deleuze's recent collection of essays. Some of the books on Foucault can quickly be discarded. One of the worst is J.G. Merquior's Foucault, in the Modern Masters series. Merquior's book makes a token effort to be fair to his Modern Master but then quickly yields to antipathy; it is not much more than a display of prejudice - about "Paris" and its "fashions", about European philosophy in general (Merquior characterizes everything from Bergson on as 'literary', a term of abuse which assumes unproblematic genre distinctions), about historical method (which has to do essentially with factual correctness), and about the assault on liberal values that Foucault's work is supposed to represent. The import of Foucault's oeuvre is said to be nihilistic; it is hostile to the Enlightenment; it denigrates the rule of Reason. All of this is written in a rollicking polemical style; it's all either untrue or ungenerous; and it's a depressing demonstration of how easy it is, in one's irritation with some aspect of Foucault's work, not to listen to what he is saying.