School of Social and Political Sciences - Theses
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ItemThe (E)merging bodies of defence nationalism: flesh, land, law( 2018)This thesis examines emerging (and possibly subsiding) far-right ethnic nationalist groups in Australia and the UK, including the English Defence League and the Australian Defence League. For reasons outlined in the thesis, I refer to these groups as defence nationalists: as nationalists who imagine themselves as defenders of the nation and as national subjects par excellence. Throughout the thesis, I explore the narratives, imaginaries and subjectivities that sustain these groups, as well as the narratives, imaginaries and subjectivities these groups sustain. I argue that defence nationalism subsists in intersecting fantasies of flesh, land and law, which work to construct the nation and nationality as a 'fact' of the body for nationalists. I hold that through these fantasies, defence nationalists imagine a symbiotic relationship with the nation, whereby the nation is a part of the nationalist only insofar as the nationalist is a part of the nation. I argue that for defence nationalists, both the body and body politic penetrate and are penetrated by one another; contain and are contained by one another; possess and are possessed by one another; inhabit and are inhabited by one another; and, care for and are cared for by one another. Throughout, I explore how and why defence nationalists attempt find the self with/in the nation and the nation with/in the self. The task of this thesis is to explore entanglements of flesh, land and law that do not constitute a mere linking, but an elision such that it is impossible to distinguish where one body ends and another begins. I consider how these entanglements of flesh, land and law provide nationalists with the defence league as a body that functions as a prosthetic that both authors and authorises practices of embodiment, speech, violence and identification. Drawing on a range of critical and psychoanalytic theorists, most notably the work of Jacques Lacan, I ultimately argue that unlike other nationalist groups, defence nationalists are not primarily concerned with realising their avowed political projects. Instead, I show they are primarily concerned with constructing and then enjoying themselves as the self-ordained defenders of the nation—that is, as privileged national subjects who get to do the nation's defending. As I demonstrate, this means that that which threatens the nation can paradoxically have a fortifying effect upon defence nationalists, legitimising and securing both the way they see themselves and the position they see themselves occupying with/in the nation.
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ItemVeiled and unveiled: bodies without shadows in the fantasy of unveiling freedom( 2016)Veiled women in the West are menacing. Their visible invisibility is a cause of obsession. What is this fixation on the veil and the veiled woman? In this thesis I frame this question in another way: what is beneath the veil more than a woman? The thesis investigates the preoccupation with the veiled body through the discursive imaging and imagining of Muslim women. It examines the relationship between the body and knowledge through the politics of freedom as grounded in the body, in the index of flesh. It contends that the impulse to unveil is more than a desire to free the Muslim woman. Behind the desire to release (Muslim) women’s bodies from the veil is the intolerable possibility of limits. This unsettling encounter with difference – a difference that destabilises Western norms of the body, as free only when it reveals itself, that institutes a politics of othering. The preoccupation with the veiled woman is a defense that preserves neither the object of orientalism nor the difference embodied in women’s bodies, but inversely, insists on the idea of a universal free subject. What lies at the heart of the politics of othering, the fantasy of saving the Muslim woman, is recast here, as the West’s desire to save itself.
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ItemThe Internet and its discontents: an analysis of the impact of digital communication technologies( 2016)This thesis establishes a social theoretical framework for analysing the impact of digital communication technologies on the social and psychic organisation of societies. This framework involves the identification of two key social positions – the ‘avataric’ and the ‘algorithmic’ – that play a predominant role in the arrangement of digitally-mediated social relations. The avataric position involves interactions mediated via constructed online identities, or avatars. The algorithmic position involves interactions mediated through the imitation of social patterns and procedures, a form of social navigation performed as if the person was an artificially intelligent computer. These social positions, in turn, foreground the ‘paranoid-schizoid’ and ‘autistoid’ modes of psychic functioning. As described by psychoanalytic theory, these are psychic modes that organise primal layers of psychic experience. This thesis puts forward the core idea that digital mediation of communications shift the dialectical balance of psychic positions towards the paranoid-schizoid and autistoid. Or, stated most simply, that the Internet has a ‘bias’ towards the psychically primal. This social theoretical framework is developed through an analysis of various Internet platforms. – namely, the computer gaming platform as illustrated World of Warcraft, the social media platform as illustrated through Facebook, and the arrangement of online information according to the Google search engine. This thesis explains many phenomena on these platforms in terms of the avataric and algorithmic social position, and their foregrounding of paranoid-schizoid and autistoid functioning. The avataric promotion of idealised forms on World of Warcraft and Facebook helps to explain phenomena such an Internet infidelity, Facebook jealousy, and the outbreaks of sadistic violence in trolling, flaming and grief play. The algorithmic promotion of social imitation and procedural functioning helps to explain phenomena such as ‘grinding’ – repetitive action to build experience points – within World of Warcraft and ‘friending’ – a quantitative building of popularity – on Facebook. This thesis utilises this framework to analyse the phenomenon of Internet plagiarism in relation to the arrangement of online information by the Google search engine. Plagiarism is structurally elicited by the flattened field of online information, and the Google search engine can be understood as a generator of echolalic material. Having established this framework for analysing digital communications, this thesis provides a basis to understand online addictions in terms of foregrounding of the paranoid-schizoid and autistoid psychic modes of functioning. This analysis also provides concepts through which programmers can better construct future Internet platforms to promote a balanced interplay of psychic functioning.
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ItemAntagonism, co-optation, fragmentation: unravelling the triple bind of green political struggle( 2014)Climate change represents the entry of the planet and its inhabitants into uncharted territory, but a meaningful collective response is elusive. This thesis seeks to unravel this political deadlock, in both senses: to trace its structural causes and to transcend it. It aims to trace and to advance the fortunes of ecologism as a political ideology. It approaches climate change as a problem of cultural politics, as a contest to define climate change, as it is the meaning of climate change that sets the parameters of what action can appropriately be taken. Part One employs discourse theory to analyse the formation and reproduction of environmental discourses, how they recruit subjects, and the conflicts between them. Chapter one examines the climate sceptic movements in the US and Australia. It goes beyond analysis of the material bases of these movements to explain how they exploit deep-seated imaginaries of nation and frontierism to corrupt rational deliberation. At the other end of the scale, leading climate nations spruik their green credentials. Yet by analysing the official climate discourse of Great Britain, chapter two reveals a co-optive strategy aimed not at ecological crisis but at the legitimation crisis it poses to key market and state institutions. A third feature of climate politics is the ‘silent majority’. Chapter three enumerates the unfulfilled conditions that keep certain citizens from engaging in climate politics, even when they accept the science. Part One concludes that ecologism, which seeks to reconcile ecology and society, is caught in a triple bind of antagonism, fragmentation, and co-optation that preserves the hegemonic order of growth- and consumerism-based capitalism. Part Two assesses possible ways to transcend the triple bind. Chapters four and five pursue the promise of an ecological subject, a collective agent that retains a kernel of autonomy from hegemonic discourse. It suggests such a subject does not exist behind or before discourse – as a primordial, pre-linguistic subject – but in the spaces between discourses, spaces that are not, as such, natural, but social. Chapter six further develops this argument. Enlisting the burgeoning ‘post-nature’ literature, it contends that an ecological subject, as liberatory social subject, is held back by the overarching category of Nature. Nature is implicated in the hegemony of capitalist modernity, and engenders a transcendent, ‘monotheistic’ planet immune to the damage humans inflict upon it. Finally, I turn to the strategic question of how Greens may negotiate the choice between radicalism – ‘pure’ but irrelevant – and the Faustian bargain of reform. Chapter seven contends that a third strategic alternative exists. It suggests that co-opted environmentalism can undermine the binaries that exclude its radical wing through a strategy of ‘subversive rearticulation’. Through a carefully orchestrated series of discursive pivots, subversive rearticulation can incrementally deflect, and ultimately unravel, the hegemonic logic of the triple bind.
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ItemThe past that outlived itself: German re-unification and its discontents( 2014)This is a study of social change and memory, of ideology and history, of psyche and society. It concerns the lives of eastern and western Germans in the years since the Fall of the Berlin Wall. “The East German,” in particular, has been a subject of fascination since at least 1989, but this thesis is concerned less with “how they were back then” or “what made them the way they are” than with what they have been told to be and become since the Fall of the Berlin Wall. I am interested in their accounts of what they have become and what they make of their western German counterparts. Hence, while the really-existing Berlin Wall is, for this thesis, of some (historical) significance, the “Wall in the Head” is of greater significance. This Mauer im Kopf is the barrier said to block the true arrival of the East German in the West and vice versa—something psychic is in the path of East and West unity. Many interpretations have been offered of why this geographic or longitudinal identification with East or West endures, despite the dismantling of physical borders. This study surveys this material with a view to providing a novel interpretation which draws on psychoanalytic understandings of ideology, history, subjectivity and memory. The concepts of Nachträglichkeit, as related to historical narration, and fantasy, as it concerns individual and social life, are central to this study. In this analysis, I argue that the discontents of re-unification cluster around East-West relations due to the predominant fantasy of re-unified Germany. The processes at play in the German transition and German history produced a set of distinct longitudinal identities and subject positions, while these also drew on longer geographic distinctions. The re-unification process was far more complex and difficult than anyone had initially imagined, subject to both political whim and historical contingencies. The Wende period emerges as a crucial era in the memorial and historical consciousness of eastern Germans. I describe the mutual distrust of eastern and western Germans. Secured by Cold War ideologies and new post-89 fantasies, these distinctions have been perpetuated by the largely west-derived logics of social, cultural and economic re-unification. Understanding this entails discussion of both the Holocaust’s legacy in German memory and the legacy of the revolution that saw the Berlin Wall fall in 1989. Post-war and post-wall are not isolated moments but deeply entwined events which continue to be articulated in similar terms. This similarity finds voice not only in reference to Germany’s “two dictatorships,” but also in unconscious repetitions and displacements. This study asks how German re-unification is at once a success and a failure. I argue re-unification has been formally fair and materially unfair. I question how those who carried out the 1989 revolution have ended up materially and politically alienated in re-unified Germany. In answering this question, I begin by exploring re-unification policies of historical reckoning and ways of coming to terms with the past. Elaborating this, I move to consider Ostalgie, a set of cultural practices purportedly expressing nostalgia for East Germany. I also consider three films (The Lives of Others, Good Bye Lenin! and Material) which represent touchstones in debates around 1989, the GDR and re-unified Germany. In the final chapter, I look to 2009 as a commemorative year of the Wall’s fall—how do commemorations function and what is their function, how was the narrative constrained and articulated during these events? Throughout, I draw upon a diverse set of primary and secondary sources, including films, museums, literary texts, advertisements, everyday objects and so on. This study is “about Germany” in the most basic sense, but it is also a test in applying psychoanalytic theory to an empirical “archive” or case study. I argue that we can make sense of the stalled and thwarted aspects of German re-unification through psychoanalytic theory. Both implicitly and explicitly, I propose that using a psychoanalytic framework can be an extremely productive way to make sense of complex national situations, where the approaches of political science and traditional anthropology leave something to be desired. The emphases on unconscious processes, the decentred subject and ideology are a fruitful and broadly applicable way of approaching political and social life, as this case study exemplifies. The theory used in this thesis is not merely instrumental (i.e., the best way to comprehend and interpret certain events), but an end in itself—analysis of the specific German case flows back into, and elucidates, understandings of these theoretical positions in general. If the German example is, in some senses, a case study in extremis of the ways in which society is divided, this is useful in the sense that it may show us all the more clearly the ordinary functioning of contemporary ideologies.
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ItemPauline, politics and psychoanalysis: theorising racism in Australia( 1999)This thesis uses a psychoanalytic approach to examine the phenomenon of the rise of the Pauline Hanson and the One Nation political party. Psychoanalysis, as the discipline concerned with developing an understanding of irrationality and the human emotions, is well-placed to tackle issues such as insecurity, resentment and racism. By reviewing the works of a number of psychoanalytic theorists, this thesis suggests ways that they may help us to understand the success of One Nation in Australia. Through this approach, I aim to bring new insights to the study of racism in contemporary Australia. The first part of this thesis consists of a survey of the contentions of six key psychoanalytic theorists. This analysis shows that psychoanalysis affords us an understanding of the subject as a complex being; attached to, and even constituted by, certain images and ideals. In the second section, I suggest ways in which psychoanalytic theory may assist us to develop a more comprehensive understanding of the Pauline Hanson phenomenon. This analysis deals with only a few selected aspects of Hansonism, but to the extent that this can be seen as a synecdoche of the whole, it suggests that the attainment of a full understanding of racism and the human emotions is more complex and difficult task than we often acknowledge.