School of Culture and Communication - Theses
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ItemMontage Vietnam: documentary aesthetics and the dialectic of popular radicalism( 2014)This thesis is the first in-depth study of the politics of exposition in explicitly political, populist documentary, taking as case studies three pivotal documentaries of the Vietnam era - Emile de Antonio’s In the Year of the Pig (1968), Peter Davis’ Hearts and Minds (1973) and The Newsreel Film Collective’s Summer 68 (1969). Three different aesthetic approaches are linked by the filmmakers’ desire to undermine dominant representations of ‘the television war’ whilst consciously avoiding relegation to the art-house for fear of ‘preaching to the choir’. As such, the desire to reach as wide an audience as possible is continually offset by the politics of visual pleasure and documentary realism. This thesis offers an examination of how these tensions play out, termed here the dialectic of popular radicalism. These films’ political aesthetic can be mapped by examining their dialectical relationship to both mainstream entertainment and news services, as well as European modernism. This map will use the mechanics of each film’s metalanguage as its defining structure. Through a recalibration of Comolli and Narboni’s influential ‘Cinema/Ideology/Criticism’ (1969) - via the varied lenses of documentary, genre and Soviet film theory - a politicised understanding of Keith Beattie’s ‘documentary display’ will be produced. It is my contention that the dialectic between popular and radical sensibilities manifests in varying degrees of visibility of each film’s metalanguage, or textual ‘voice’, to use Bill Nichols’ 1981 formulation. This visibility is at the heart of these films’ political aesthetic. Solidifying Nichols’ conception of voice as the metalanguage of the popular political documentary provides a concrete means of understanding documentary realism in relation to rhetoric: rather than looking through documentary’s window onto the world, it draws focus onto the window itself. Taking lessons from Marxist aesthetic and film theory as well as the works themselves, this thesis encourages an antagonistic approach to traditional structures of representation in documentary, while taking into account the dynamic nature of aesthetic radicalism and the need for rhetorical intelligibility. If accepting cinema as a continuously evolving textual system necessitates the abandonment of static notions of classicism, it follows that we must also jettison those regarding documentary progressivity.
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ItemThe aesthetics of counter-memory: contemporary art and Australian refugee histories after Tampa( 2013)This thesis provides the first in-depth examination of experimental methods for memorialising Australian refugee experiences in works by the contemporary artists Rosemary Laing, Dierk Schmidt, Lyndell Brown and Charles Green. As this thesis argues, each of these artists’ methods for memorialising refugee experiences is distinguished by the use of montage (the conjoining of disparate materials and references). By bringing together—or montaging—cultural documents from a variety of sources at both a historical and geographic level, these artists create deeply fragmented images of refugee histories. Representations of refugee experiences such as those involving the Tampa, the “children overboard” affair and SIEV-X are juxtaposed and sutured with a range of other seemingly incongruous histories from the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In engaging strategies of montage and juxtaposition, this thesis finds that the artists examined therein develop a distinct paradigm of experimental memorialisation—termed here the aesthetics of counter-memory. Developed through a critical engagement with discourses on contemporaneity, globalisation, migration and memory, this thesis’ development of the notion of the aesthetics of counter-memory offers a historical and theoretical framework for understanding the import of Laing, Schmidt and Brown and Green’s experimental methods of memorialisation. In contrast to the notion of the “counter-monument”, which focuses on analysing official and state-sanctioned memorials, the notion of the aesthetics of counter-memory addresses the possibility of art directly intervening in the politics of memory of that which escapes collective consciousness: that is, the politics of who and what is remembered and why. As this thesis shows, in grappling with the politics of memory, the aesthetics of counter-memory refuses didactic or agitprop modes of communication and is instead structured by affective and poetic forms of address. The aesthetics of counter-memory determines our experience of migratory flows, place and inter-subjectivity through a series of analogies, resonances, ligatures, networks and border-crossings. It places montage and juxtaposition—the conjunction of heterogenous and at times seemingly incongruous things—as central to a critical understanding of experiences of place, migration and exile in the twenty-first century. In mapping the emergence of the aesthetics of counter-memory this thesis theorises and analyses a new paradigm of contemporary art and its impact on remembrances of recent refugee histories.
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ItemDialectical aesthetics: war theatre in the twenty-first century( 2013)This thesis analyzes twenty-first century plays that respond to the post-9/11 Western military operations in Afghanistan, Iraq and Palestine. It examines six recent anti-war plays by renowned Western playwrights and theatremakers Tony Kushner (America), the Théâtre du Soleil (France), Elfriede Jelinek (Austria) and Caryl Churchill (Britain). The study employs a methodology based on the theoretical writings of seminal playwright, director and thinker Bertolt Brecht and his application of Marxist dialectics to the theatre. It reviews the historical relation between Marxist dialectics and dramatic aesthetics for Brecht and develops a definition of the ‘Brechtian dialectical aesthetic’. It argues that the critiques of war and its effects in the chosen contemporary plays can usefully be understood in relation to the Brechtian devices of Verfremdungseffekt, gestus, historicization and the refunctioning of the passive spectator. Employing these Brechtian tools, the thesis shows how the chosen case studies are critical of the rhetorical and visual depictions of contemporary conflicts in the Middle East, as represented in the mainstream media and public discourse. This research proffers a vocabulary for better understanding and articulating the relationship between the politics of war and dramatic aesthetics in the twenty-first century.
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ItemSadomasochism as aesthetic sexuality: a cultural history from the late eighteenth century to the present( 2010)Foucault’s ars erotica, one of the most enigmatic concepts in history-of-sexuality studies, has been largely overshadowed by the examination of scientia sexualis and its creation: sexuality constructed as a natural, inborn and permanent function of the body subject to acquired or congenital pathologies. With sexuality, a truth to be discovered and analysed, sexual acts and desires became involuntary manifestations of a fixed biological cause. Foucault argues that only scientia sexualis has operated in modern Western culture whilst ars erotica belongs to Eastern and ancient societies, although in his late essays he suggests that invoking ‘sex as aesthetics’ may be a useful political strategy for marginalised sexualities. Ars erotica, then, is framed as preceding sexuality and as a possible replacement for it. In this thesis, I suggest that modern Western culture has indeed witnessed a form of ars erotica, encompassed in what I term ‘aesthetic sexuality’, which I argue has existed since the eighteenth century. To argue for the existence of aesthetic sexuality, I show how sexuality is constructed as having aesthetic value, a quality that marks this experience as a form of art. Value and meaning are located within sexual practice and pleasure rather than in their underlying cause; sexuality’s raison d’être is tied to its aesthetic value, at surface level rather than beneath it. Aesthetic sexuality is a product of choice, a deliberate strategy of self-creation as well as a mode of social communication, and therefore can be chosen and cultivated by potentially any individual on the basis of its intended aesthetic value. I suggest that, in contrast with the legal, medical and psychiatric discourses and practices that composed the scientia sexualis, aesthetic sexuality is founded upon discourses pertaining to aesthetic theory and philosophy. I construct a cultural history of aesthetic sexuality using the case study of sadomasochism. Each chapter advances my argument by demonstrating the evolving aesthetic value of sadomasochism—the different ways in which the practice has been constructed as art—and showing how different aspects of aesthetic sexuality have been emphasised in different historical periods. I begin this cultural history by examining novels by the Marquis de Sade through the aesthetic philosophy of Kant, Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, Hume and Burke, before employing the aestheticism of Walter Pater to discuss the sadomasochistic poetry of Algernon Charles Swinburne and the novel Torture Garden by Octave Mirbeau. I then provide an exposition of Nietzsche’s aesthetics in order to show their influence on constructions of sadomasochism by Bataille, Réage and de Berg. The aesthetics of Baudrillard, Foucault, Jameson and Butler are then used to examine American political and pornographic writing from 1981 to the early twenty-first century. I conclude this thesis by investigating what the model of aesthetic sexuality developed in the preceding chapters reveals about the most conspicuous articulations of sadomasochism in popular culture today, that is, in mainstream fashion and the subcultural forms defined against it. These particular constructions of sadomasochism, and the aesthetics that inform them, have been selected as those that contribute most significantly to the history of aesthetic sexuality.
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ItemThomas De Quincey and the serpentine line( 2010)This thesis provides the first examination of the roles played by the serpentine line in De Quincey’s work, where it shapes representations of textuality, autobiography, aesthetics, epistemology and hermeneutics, and characterises a digressive sublime that forms both texts and individuals. When De Quincey began writing, Hogarth’s serpentine line was widely disseminated and threaded into the weave of European culture. This is perhaps why De Quincey’s explicit references to Hogarth are sparse and the relationship between the two artists has been neglected by critics. Nonetheless, the serpentine line as image and structure convincingly characterises important strands of De Quincey’s work. It offers him, as it had Hogarth’s Renaissance forebears, a concordia discors. In his hands, the undulating line becomes a flexible image of harmony in discord or discord in harmony, and a visual ground for the dynamic, dialectical antitheses so important to Romanticism. In a further iteration, De Quincey’s serpentine lines model an oscillation that incorporates without collapsing many of the dichotomies of the post-Kantian world. It thus performs on an aesthetic level the very kind of two-in-oneness demanded by post-Kantian and Romantic dilemmas. To establish the serpentine line’s particular relevance to De Quincey, as well as his deviations from his predecessors, I chart the historical trajectories of the serpentine line from the Renaissance figura serpentinata into the nineteenth century, with particular emphasis on Hogarth’s paradigmatic definition and exploration of the line in his Analysis of Beauty (1753). This genealogy reveals the serpentine line’s repertoire of associations and possibilities, the contrary roles it could be cast in and lines it could be made to deliver—radical, conservative, fluid, static, progressive, aimless, translational, nationalist, chaotic and orderly. The central text through which I read De Quincey’s reworkings of this tradition is the late autobiographical work Suspiria de Profundis (1845). Hogarthian principles of variety, intricacy, lively movement and pursuit are evident in Suspiria’s pervasive images of wavy lines; but De Quincey’s serpentine lines are also shaped by his distinctive concerns in literature, theology, science, and philosophy, particularly the philosophy of Kant. De Quincey’s engagement with Kant is elucidated by an examination of ‘On the German Literature and Kant in particular,’ another autobiographical text shaped by serpentine lines—this time primarily structurally, in the undulating course of the digressive textual sublime. Analysis of this essay throws light on the Kantian cast of De Quincey’s epistemology, particularly in Suspiria’s ‘Palimpsest,’ which imagines the mind as a text. Conversely, the last scene in Suspiria illuminates the Kantian cast of De Quincey’s aesthetic hermeneutics. Suffused by serpentine lines, Suspiria’s final pages dally with a German Romantic transformation of the serpentine line into an ironic arabesque, but finally reject this involuted, utopian figure of total chaos or total sense for a progressive English serpentine line, infinitely oscillating between chaos and order, forgetting and remembering, death and resurrection, nonsense and sense, relevance and irrelevance, heteronomy and autonomy, identity and difference.