School of Culture and Communication - Theses
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ItemUnputdownable: how the agencies of compelling story assembly can be modelled using formalisable methods from Knowledge Representation, and in a fictional tale about seduction( 2012)As a story unfolds, its structure can drive a reader to want to know more, in a manner that writers sometimes refer to as unputdownable. I model this behaviour so that it can be applied in two fields: creative writing and Knowledge Representation. Two forms of answer to my thesis question therefore emerged – a formalisable diagrammatic method, and an excerpt from a fictional novel, The Snakepig Dialect. The opening section of my thesis accounts for the theoretical exploration. This framework is designed to support a specific target product: a knowledge base capable of assembling fragments of information into causally coherent ‘stories.’ This assembly would be achieved through the identification of causal agents that connect the fragments, and a causal impetus that would enable the projection of possible outcomes, even when there is no precedent for them. This integration is managed by two novel features of my Dynamic Story Model. First, in order to facilitate accurate interpretation, I consider that multiple contextual situations must be arranged into relationships, just as concepts are positioned in semantic networks. Second, the associative priorities of these multiple inferences are managed by a principle that I term governance, in which the structures of some networks are able to modify and connect others. In order to extend current devices in Knowledge Representation so that these features can be represented, I draw on my own creative writing practice, as well as existing theories in Narratology, Discourse Processes, Causal Philosophy and Conceptual Change. This model of unputdownability is expressed differently in my fictional submission. The tale is set in a future Australia, in which China is the dominant culture, the weather seems to be developing intentional behaviours, and Asia's largest defence laboratory sometimes selects unusual talents to work in its invention shop. One apprentice in this institute, Lilah, falls in love with someone who seems unattainable. Instead of solving the assigned problem, she develops a formula for seduction, testing it on her beloved before she is capable of controlling her strange gift. Lilah’s seduction technique is based on a principle of governance similar to that described by my theoretical model. She learns to how to seduce by offering only fragments of information about herself, drawing her beloved into her story by provoking wonder, which eventually bends her lover’s desires. Lilah’s tale also explores the challenge of modelling a new scientific theory, and she struggles with the same difficulty of articulating an elusive phenomenon that I have in this research (but iii! with more dramatic consequences for her failures). At the same time as featuring the core concern of my research question in the plot, I have also used my model to revive this novel. By establishing terms of agency and allowing them to evolve, each section of text came to build on the next, so the reader could wonder how they might resolve. In this way, I anchored my theoretical propositions about stories in fictional practice, and gained insight into the writing process, in order to revive my ailing novel.
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ItemFrontier justice in the novels of James Fenimore Cooper and Cormac McCarthy( 2012)With narratives set on the American frontier and a focus on the disappearance of the frontier and its intergenerational legacy, James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales (1823-1841) and Cormac McCarthy’s series of Southwestern novels (1985-2005) share a genre and a set of common interests. Recently, however, critics of the two series have noted a closer kinship between them, a kinship that emerges as McCarthy recurrently alludes to Cooper’s work and its status as the foremost canonical work of frontier fiction in the American tradition. In this thesis, asking whether there might be more substance to that kinship, I suggest that Cooper and McCarthy share similar concerns about the effect of the frontier as a site of settlement on the jurisprudential principles of the American justice system as codified in the United States Constitution. With his Tales, I argue, Cooper articulated an ambivalent response to the nineteenth century popularisation of what I call the ethic of frontier justice — a mode of jurisprudence, emerging from the settlement of the frontier, which departs from that of the Constitution — while McCarthy’s Southwestern series identifies its ongoing popularity, despite the absence of the frontier, and points to Cooper’s Tales as having contributed to its survival.
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ItemPower in transformation: Christmas Island, border security, governance( 2012)In 2012, Christmas Island is best known as a place of immigration detention, a component of Australia’s expanding border security apparatus. In the 124 years since it was annexed by the British, Christmas Island has continued to take on changing political forms. In exploring these changes empirically and theoretically, this thesis gives an account of the mutation of political sovereignty, the emergence of globalisation, the installation of governance, and their current co-operation through the practice of border security and immigration detention, as seen from the Island. It considers the way shifts in thinking and ways of imagining problems – as political, as urgent – have provoked and continue to prompt the construction of certain kinds of structures: mines, casinos, and now the immigration detention centre. The centre is a high-tech, medium security prison situated in the middle of a tropical rainforest that includes back-to-base surveillance technology, wheelchair access, and specially designed concrete tunnels constructed to facilitate the orderly migration of red crabs across the Island. The core argument stems from the recognition that all governing is a matter of problem solving, but that, every time, problems are solved within the enabling constraints characterising each problem space. Governing moves from imagination to application to a materiality that turns out to be perennially unruly: nothing works as intended; yesterday’s best laid plans are today’s follies; things fall apart. The picture of power’s transformations depicted points not only to the transience of all things human, but that what is characteristic of power’s shape in our time is that it holds without the centre. And yet, Christmas Island’s story is also full of ironies and impasses. The attempted passage of authority through governance and the restless, anxious search for accumulative mobility characteristic of today’s capitalism also, paradoxically, produces specific sites of friction and immobility, certain kinds of paralysis, and a curious desire to project messages into a region and future that border security can only recognise and secure as a threat-filled theatre of interdiction. Christmas Island is strange, but the ways in which it is tell a striking and disquieting story about how power came to be what it is, while suggesting what we might be becoming. In accounting for transformations of power on Christmas Island, this thesis also offers an account of the conceptual and intellectual resources necessary to make sense of the power relations to which we are subject: here, now and in the future.
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ItemThe butterfly in the antipodes: James McNeill Whistler's graphic work in the National Gallery of Victoria: history and legacy( 2012)This thesis interrogates the history and legacy of James McNeill Whistler’s graphic work in Victoria and, more broadly, Australia. The holdings of Whistler’s black and white work at the National Gallery of Victoria [NGV] are employed as a case study through which Whistler’s importance in Australia is examined. This dissertation argues that an analysis of the provenance of this collection reveals the history of Whistler’s artistic reception and reputation and proposes that the collection can act as a historical barometer, charting changes in the legacy of Whistler’s graphic art in Australia. Four periods central to the development of the history and legacy of Whistler in Australia are proposed by this thesis. The first is the earliest arrival of Whistler’s work in Australia, at the NGV in 1892, which prompted the first serious appreciation of Whistler’s artistic reputation. The second is the impact that Whistler’s graphic work had on the development of the Australian etching movement in the first decades of the twentieth century and the extent to which the artist’s influence was noticeably long lasting. The third is the inclusion of Whistler’s graphic art into the homes of Melbourne’s wealthier citizens in the inter-War era and the particular taste in interior design that this reflects. The fourth is the NGV’s recognition of Whistler’s established reputation as a leading print artist of the nineteenth-century etching revival through the targeted acquisition of his work in the mid-twentieth century. The important place in the history of graphic art that Whistler’s work occupies has recently been shown by the launch of the significant online catalogue raisonné of Whistler’s etchings. This thesis seeks to extend this scholarship on Whistler’s graphic art to Australia.
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ItemFrom "Homelands" to "Wastelands": landscapes of memory in poetry, place and photography( 2012)This thesis explores the gaps within the familial narrative, including those found in the photographic archive. The ideological framework of the family, and the ways in which we create and imagine domestic landscapes, is examined through a “reading” of family photographs, a key feature of this thesis. Family photographs frame and trigger individual and familial memory and instigate forgetting. Additionally, landscapes of memory and identity are strongly linked to, and inform a dis/connection to place. Our “sense of place” is also informed by trajectories of migration both forced and desired. The meaning of “home” and the ways in which we imagine “home” is, in turn, informed by the construction of myths, shared through generations. Utilising notions of memory, place and landscape in my photo-poetic work “A Time in Place” as a point of departure, the thesis also examines how cultural memory is mediated through place and photography. The thesis traverses various terrains and cultural geographies, investigating how cultural identity is both informed and challenged by myths of the nation, “home” and “homelands”, childhood and the family. Within my own family, narratives of migration and settlement both anchor familial bonds while simultaneously disputing and supporting nationalist narratives. The confluence of migrations from Jamaica, Wales and England to Australia offers a new perspective on colonisation, nationalism, belonging, and “home” in an examination of myths of the family, place, and cultural identity in Australia and my family’s countries of “origin”. An analysis of both place and the photographic image, as repositories of memory, create what Michel Foucault terms counter-memories and reveal histories “hidden” or erased in visual and written discourses of the nation-state and the dominant narrative of the family, which is often patriarchal or monolithic. The thesis also adopts an interdisciplinary approach within visual and cultural studies with a strong emphasis on feminist theories and those located within the fields of memory studies and postcolonial and diaspora studies. The thesis is divided into two sections: the photo-poetic work “A Time in Place” and the critical component entitled “From “Homelands” to “Wastelands””. “A Time in Place” responds to places (both in the natural and built environment) of familial and personal significance in my family’s patterns of migrations. Three parts constitute the critical component of the thesis “From “Homelands” to “Wastelands””. The first of these explores place and memory (including forgetting) in family photographs taken in Jamaica, England and Wales. The second examines the work of three contemporary photographers: Ingrid Pollard, Simryn Gill, and Sandy Edwards, and the ways in which they negotiate identity, place, space, diaspora and the family. The third investigates “sense of place” and the notion of home through a psychogeographic exploration of my “hometown”, Newcastle, Australia.
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ItemThe Persephone complex: post-feminist impasses in popular heroine television( 2012)In this thesis I examine why the myth of Persephone is being retold in post-feminist media cultures where traditional feminist critiques have been otherwise foreclosed. Using psychoanalytic theory, I argue that this Persephone is a symptom of an impasse around the question of what it means to be a woman. I consider four popular television heroines who personify this phenomenon––Ally McBeal, Sydney Bristow, Veronica Mars and Meredith Grey––to demonstrate how Persephone’s story animates the question of sexuation or sexual difference today.
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ItemBecoming worthy of the event: Left Bank trauma cinema, 1945-1962( 2012)Asking the question, ‘How can we articulate the conditions that make possible the catastrophic event without referring to any form of identity?’ this thesis considers the trauma cinema of three Rive Gauche filmmakers: Georges Franju, Chris Marker and Alain Resnais. The argument of the thesis is predicated on taking up and insisting upon the explosive and disorganising power of the traumatic event, made manifest in Le Sang des bêtes (Franju, 1949), Les Yeux sans visage (Franju, 1959), Les Statues meurent aussi (Marker and Resnais, 1953) and Muriel, ou le temps d’un retour (Resnais, 1963). The Lazarean characters that haunt these films bear witness to a radical temporal and ontological ‘ungrounding’; an ‘ungrounding’ that shatters identity and characterises catastrophe. This thesis argues that it is only in commencing with the difference that announces itself in the dissolution of identity and permanence that we can hope to create an adequate theorisation of the traumatic event. The transcendental empiricism of Gilles Deleuze provides the kernel for an in-depth analysis of catastrophe that presents an alternative to ‘deconstructive trauma studies,’ the dominant trauma paradigm within the humanities. The thesis returns to the epoch in which this methodology has its roots, the period between the end of the Second World War and the end of the Algerian War of Independence (1945-1962). It takes leave, however, from deconstructive trauma studies’ attempts to tether the traumatic event to systems of identity. Working within a Deleuzian paradigm, the thesis examines transcendental structure alongside empirical manifestation: virtual ‘becomings’ alongside actual history. Deleuze’s concepts of ‘difference-in-itself,’ ‘repetition-for-itself’ and ‘the event’ are drawn upon and extended into the field of trauma studies. The conditions of true genesis for the actual traumatic event, it is argued, are to be discovered not in identity, but in the incorporeal events and self-differentiating differences that emerge from the transcendental field of the virtual. During the event of catastrophe, these imperceptible forces inscribe themselves - via intensity or pure difference - in the flesh. The traumatic event illuminates in calamity the eruption of Deleuze’s ultimate form of repetition, which repeats only a force of pure difference. Through an intersection of Rive Gauche trauma cinema and Deleuzian philosophy, this thesis seeks to consider the differential changes that ground catastrophe, thus deepening our comprehension of the traumatic event and ethical responses to such occurrences.
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ItemForum or fortress?: artist-activism and the Whitney Museum of American Art, 1966-1976( 2012)A case study of the Whitney Museum of American Art, this dissertation will frame the intense period of artist-activism in late sixties New York through a discourse of institutional critique. In the period from 1966 to 1976 the Whitney, along with artist-activist groups such as the Art Workers’ Coalition (AWC); New York Art Strike Against War, Repression, Racism, and Sexism (Art Strike); the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition (BECC); and the Ad Hoc Women Artists’ Committee (Ad Hoc), was investigating and challenging the narrative role of artists within the Museum. This dissertation positions the changes in the Whitney’s architectural and exhibition structures in the sixties as a challenge to the Museum’s role as omniscient interpretive narrator. Subsequent artist-activist protests directed at the Museum are presented as developing this critique, by proposing the artist as actor, focalizer or narrator within the exhibition narrative. This approach privileges the activist demands for influence within the museum system, over their broader socio-political ambitions. For these activists, the Whitney was variously conceived of as a space for their art production, an arena for their political views, or a text for cultural representation. All three models conceived of the Museum as a space for multiple voices, a ‘forum’. This dissertation argues that the ideals of these artist-activist groups were increasingly incompatible with the restrictions of the Museum’s structure, resulting in the relocation of the activists’ ideals to new, non-museological art spaces. As a result of the divisive environment created by these aggressive and conflicting pressures, the Whitney repositioned itself as a ‘fortress’; preserving its collection, but becoming resistant to the pressure of artists. In this case study, the institutional critique of the late sixties and early seventies is posited as a dialogue between the Whitney and artists; where both were actively engaged in challenging the narrative and interpretive functions of the Museum.
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ItemMarketisation in 'transboundary networks': a comparative study of public service media in Australia and Germany( 2012)Public service media are in a process of change, attempting to balance the challenges of the increasing global interconnectivity of media environments. Digital communications technologies make content available on-demand via various ‘access points’ such as satellite and broadband television, tablet computers, smartphones and video game consoles, multiplying and diversifying content choices. As a result the use of media is no longer a communal but a highly individualised and fragmented activity. Furthermore, the myriads of ‘access points’ created by digital communications technologies empower individuals to directly choose what content they consume when, where and how. Media users’ empowerment significantly challenges the capacity of public service media to strengthen the democratic values and social cohesion of national societies by gathering and engaging civic communities in discourses of shared public interests. To continue to be a relevant fragment in individuals’ relationship with content, public service media organisations are inevitably drawn into multidimensional networks of marketisation involving competition and cooperations with other public service and commercial, national and transnational content providers. Built on Sassen’s (2006) approach of ‘transboundary networks’, this study investigates new models of transnational ‘commercialisation’ of public service media in Australia and Germany. The thesis explores in particular the emerging microsphere of marketisation where ‘national’ public purpose goals and ‘global’ market forces converge. These ‘transboundary’ trajectories are further examined through semi-structured interviews with corporate executives of the ABC and SBS in Australia and ZDF and Deutsche Welle in Germany. Results reveal that while marketisation relates on the surface to strategies implemented to remain competitive, at a deeper level it constitutes a means to protect and reinforce public purpose values. The leveraging of these public purpose values, which are what makes public media services marketable, constitutes a key brand advantage enabling public service media to remain competitive in complex networks of ‘coopetition’ (Küng, Leandros, Picard, Schroeder, & van der Wurff, 2008).