School of Culture and Communication - Theses
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ItemHow to do things with sadness : from ontology to ethics in Derrida(University of Melbourne, 2010)
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ItemWays of listening : dramaturgy as deep mapping in intercultural-Indigenous performance(University of Melbourne, 2010)
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ItemThe environment in English versions of the Grimms' and Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tale literature, 1823–1899( 2016)This dissertation explores the intersections between literature and environmental history in nineteenth-century English versions of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale literature. While the success of the Grimms’ and Andersen’s fairy tale literature in England can be attributed to the inclusion of Christian principles, the privileging of individualism, the omission of licentious content and the focalisation of child protagonists, this dissertation argues that the tales were also valued for presenting an environmental ethos. English versions of the Grimms’ and Andersen’s fairy tales relayed anthropocentric ideas about nature which competed with a developing sense of environmentalism during a period of rapid environmental change. While these tales idealised the tremendous possibilities offered by the environment, nature is not prioritised above human interest; rather, these versions effectively highlight humanity’s destructive disposition by disempowering female and animal characters. By focusing on depictions of nature during a century of environmental devastation, this thesis contributes to our understanding of humanity’s relationship with the natural world as relayed in literary texts.
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ItemRadical platforms: autonomism, globalisation and networks( 2016)This thesis engages in the work of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri as well as others in the post-autonomist Italian Marxist tradition to critique the concept of Empire and to identify serious flaws in cryptolibertarian approaches to replacing the state with computational apparatuses. Hardt and Negri’s work proposes the existence of an international, multi-layered political structure called Empire, with a corresponding international working class called the ‘multitude’ which has been subsumed within this new global political system. The main thrust of the thesis identifies that media is underanalysed in Hardt and Negri’s work, yet there is great scope for networked media to be included as not just a component to Empire, but as constitutive of Empire’s existence. Thus the argument is that Empire is reliant on media, and would not survive without it. From this perspective, the acts of loose groups and fraternities, such as IP pirates, cryptolibertarians and cryptofascists, and anti-state groups of other sorts, to engineer software solutions to replace the state are problematic. Examples such as 3D printing, bitcoin, Wikileaks, and State-In-A-Box suggest that cryptolibertarian and related ideologies of technological solutions not only tend to be misguided, they reproduce the nature of Empire in an intensified manner. The argument of this thesis is thus that technological solutions that seek to replace the state with mediated software protocols will likely tend to simply reproduce structures of governance that are more rigid, and have less capacity for social intervention than the current structures of governance. This argument does not preclude technological methods as integral to political solutions in the future, but certainly questions those approaches that conceive of society as a set of problems to be solved.
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ItemTranslating chaos: the modern purification of materiality and ideology( 2017)Complexity theory’s philosophical interpretation of the mathematical phenomenon of chaos has been taken up across various humanities fields. However, this interdisciplinary translation fails to hold the two cultures (science and the humanities) and their histories of the present together and apart coherently. Complexity theory has an obvious historical and mathematical problem, which mathematicians noticed, but which turns out to be a less obvious philosophical one. But mathematics also has a historical and philosophical problem with chaos, which turns out to be a mathematical one. This poses my research question: what is chaos? Why do these translations fail? Is there an interpretation through which I can understand the philosophy, history and mathematics of chaos? In order to solve this problem of translating chaos, I will argue that it is related to a broader problem that Bruno Latour calls ‘modern purification’: an operation that separates nature and culture – and the two cultures that will study them – into distinct domains. I will argue that purification operates by insisting that one of two purified questions is out of the question in modernity: either that of ‘materiality’ (embodying things) for the humanities – or ‘ideology’ (thinking thought) for science. My critique of modernity and the way it frames two distinct cultures contends that neither of these questions is or ever was an unquestionable foundation. This thesis will argue that if I study translations of modernity from each of the two cultures and their histories of the present, then I still perform modern translation and modern purification, but I can no longer believe that these operations ever really worked. If the two cultures have different foundations and questions of materiality and ideology, then the two cultures will therefore have different, but related, kinds of thought and things and histories of the present. This argument offers an explanation of how and why the two cultures mistranslate one another, but also how the questions of what they promise and reduce are related. It is therefore possible to show how the two cultures can be intertwined in a productive way. Analysing modern purification will enable me to explain why translations of chaos fail for both science and the humanities. This analysis offers an alternative explanation of what chaos is philosophically, historically and mathematically, why modern mathematics forgot chaos for sixty years, and why mathematicians have a theoretical problem of how to define it. Studying modern purification reveals why complexity theory’s translation of chaos – and, more broadly, the later material, speculative and posthuman ‘turns’– recuperate a vitalist materiality when modern mathematicians and the Newtonian history of classical natural philosophy had already realised that there is no such thing as modern mechanism. My critique of modern purification also entails a critique of Foucault’s poststructuralism and of science studies, which remember how modernity reimagines the concepts of time and ideology, but forget to ask how modernity reimagines the concepts of space and materiality. I will also connect my argument to Barad’s concept of ‘diffraction’ and Merleau-Ponty’s concept of ‘chiasm’ in order to demonstrate how the question of embodying the body in modern physics and the question of seeing the gaze in modern philosophy are related: neither of these two purified questions was ever out of the question.
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ItemWriting places: whiteness and the design of the built environment( 2018)The design of the built environment affects people. In Australia, designed spaces reflect specific ideas about nationhood that do not represent the reality of a diverse population. Instead, a white national identity pervades with unresolved issues of land often at the heart of such identity narratives. Whiteness, understood as a specific power structure, operates through landscapes and architecture in explicit and implicit ways. Indigenous cultural identities are also present within and against all of these expressions of whiteness. Such tensions arise in the first instance due to manifestations of whiteness in designed spaces being situated in Indigenous lands and Country while colonial histories and their associated violence, both symbolic and literal, remain largely unacknowledged. This thesis uses a mixed methodology to investigate a range of spaces, including demarcated national spaces, memorial sites, and places of exhibition, through the lens of critical race and whiteness studies to reveal how these identity tensions occur. Though the Australian context is the main focus of the study, an initial look to how similar issues are playing out in the US highlights the existence of transnational whiteness and the nature of the newly-formed relationship between the two nations at the time of Australia’s Federation. It is argued that the complicated relationship between these cultural identities affects the way landscapes and architecture are experienced, whether this is realised on a conscious level or not. Further, by using critical and reflexive modes of engagement, designers can gain deeper insights into place, see and feel their position in relation to these identity tensions, and understand how power is operating through them. This examination of the way cultural identities such as whiteness and Indigeneity are expressed through the design of national, memorial and exhibition spaces, allows a way into thinking about how the same tensions and power dynamics may also be taking place in more everyday spaces.
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ItemGlobal positioning: international auctions and the development of the Western market for Chinese Contemporary art, 1998-2012( 2018)This thesis examines the role of international auction houses in developing a Western market for Chinese Contemporary art from 1998 to 2012. It highlights six art auction events as pivotal for the transmission of cultural and economic value from local contexts to global acceptance. This thesis underscores the agency of collectors, networked art mediators and auctions to influence market expansion in the West, thereby revealing auctions as creators and consecrators of symbolic and economic value of Chinese Contemporary art.
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ItemMaurice Blanchot: three terrors( 2018)This thesis studies the political and critical writings of Maurice Blanchot from 1933 to 1949, a period in which he underwent a number of fundamental intellectual changes that were most famously but not only political. Its overarching trope is that of the terror, which appears in three very different guises, in 1936, 1941, and 1947, playing a central role in Blanchot’s engagement each time. The terror is one of the major metaphorical complexes of twentieth century French letters. It is essentially a nested series of discourses (and medical and juridical metaphors) about how discourse connects to reality or only to itself, which makes it essentially reflexive, as well as immediately political, literary and philosophical. In it the twin heritages of revolution and Romanticism are repeatedly struggled over and re-worked into their modern forms. My thesis elaborates Blanchot’s reckonings with this complex as a means to demonstrating the precise nature of his various changes. The goal is not to explain his political ‘turn’ but to specify the categorical modifications to his thinking that it presupposes. I trace the increasing sophistication of Blanchot’s political and literary thinking, arguing that initially Blanchot’s national revolutionary politics are formally anti-Semitic in that the prerequisite for national restoration is the violent expurgation of what is foreign. It is only with his encounter with thinkers like Jean Paulhan and Brice Parain in the 1940s that he develops an account of how terror and rhetoric, or destruction and articulation, mediate but do not limit one another, and begins to conceive of literature as the sovereign creation-destruction of realities via their interaction. It is his encounter with Hegel that enables him to re-link this conception to history by arguing that it directly corresponds to revolution, a view founded on Hegel’s basic homology between language and history. I argue that Blanchot’s identification of himself with revolution, as well as his negative reading of Hegel (his refusal of ‘achieved’ sense and development generally), sets a kind of absolute positioning named ‘ambiguity’ from which Blanchot will endeavour to think henceforth: it leads directly to his tendency to proceed by the unfolding of paradoxes and to the inescapably plural meaning of his 1950s (anti-)categories such as the neuter. It also precludes the possibility of a fixed division between literature and the political, which I argue is sufficient grounds for ruling out modelling his turn on a transition from one to the other. Such a reading, which is more explicitly materialist than most of those proposed to date, provides a different basis from which to approach Blanchot’s celebrated 1950s critical writings: namely, that they are suffused with the absolute experience of the identity with literature and revolution that Blanchot ‘becomes’ in the late 1940s. It also implies that Blanchot was preoccupied with thinking the link between literature and history throughout his career, and that even the rarefied nature of some of his writings is due to this very issue and his responses to it, rather than to his indifference to such a link.
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ItemCollaborative drawing on Captain Cook's Endeavour voyage, 1768-1771: an intellectual history of artistic practice( 2018)This thesis investigates what can be learned from the drawn gesture on paper by locating it in the historical context in which it was made. This ‘contextualist’ approach to drawing analysis is derived from the methodologies used for text analysis in intellectual history. Intellectual historians recapture the meaning a text conveyed to its original readers by reconstructing the ‘language game’ of the author. The game has two dimensions in this approach: the concepts and practices that define the cultural norms of the author’s society and intellectual community, and might be described as the ‘rules of the game’, and the creative ‘moves’ made by individuals within these parameters as participants in a discourse with the author that constitute the game’s ‘play’. This thesis proposes to expand the field of intellectual history by incorporating the dimension of gesture into the moves of the language game to allow drawing and writing to be studied together. This gestural dimension of the linguistic move constitutes artistic practice in the terms of this thesis. The ramifications of its incorporation into the play of discourse are illustrated in a case study of the first part of Captain Cook’s Endeavour voyage of Pacific exploration from 1768 to 1771, the voyage to Tahiti to observe the transit of Venus. Part One, ‘Intellectual Parameters,’ constructs a model of Georgian civil society that provides the foundation for the linguistic context in which the expedition’s manuscripts of texts and drawings will be read in the chapters of the thesis. Part Two, ‘Drawing Practices,’ applies this model to develop a detailed picture of the expedition’s working community by reconstructing the artists’ drawing sessions in the Atlantic. Part Three, ‘Discourse,’ interprets the drawings of Tupaia, the man who joined Cook’s voyage to travel to England, and his discourse through the bridging languages of navigation and cartography with several members of the expedition, to produce a new reading of the Endeavour’s purpose of discovery in the South Pacific and Cook’s claims to possession.
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ItemMoving mountains: interwar collecting of French modernist art and the economics of translocation( 2018)A distinguishing feature of the Parisian art market during the interwar period was the influx of art collectors from outside continental Europe, who, in many cases, benefited from a currency advantage against the weakened French franc. These collectors expedited a large-scale translocation of French modernist artwork, the causes and consequences of which have been the subject of a range of recent publications and exhibitions. However, the significance of the underlying economic context surrounding this translocation remains less studied and poorly understood. This thesis draws on unpublished archival correspondence, gallery records and quantitative economic data to construct case studies of prominent interwar art collectors in France, Britain, America, Japan, Australia and Brazil. These case studies are thematically linked by two arguments: first, that the collapse in the value of the French franc, among other economic disruptions, played a significant role in the timing, scale and international dispersion of French modernist art; second, that foregrounding the underlying economic context provides a fresh insight into the importance of the newly assembled international collections, which are shown to have significantly influenced the reception of French modernist art in their respective locations. In substantiating these arguments, the thesis seeks to provide an alternative perspective within which the activities of interwar art collectors and the causes and consequences of the translocation of French modernist art can be further understood.