Jason Ensor
International Reprints and Australian Writing
One important item to come out of the recent controversial Productivity Commission report is the recommendation for revised statistics on the Australian book trade. This article reviews the reprinting of Australian writing around the world.
Twitter and Oz Lit
I don’t know diarist William Bunn personally but I know that on February 6 he was “Reading Sunshine and Snow” and that he had “read it nearly through”. You may wonder why someone would care what Bunn had on his bookshelves at the start of February, but Bunn felt it important enough to record this [...]
The Commitment to Nation in Literary History
Embedded within any statistical analysis of Australian literature are definitional issues over the research sample.
The Smashed Apricot
The Smashed Apricot (Arts Naked Publications, 2009) contains 15 original cocktails, all of which have been tested, refined and enjoyed at many a family gathering. Each recipe has a photo of its contributor and an anecdote which provides some history, potency or suggested occasion for which the drink was made.
Editions from Elsewhere?
For quite a while, I’ve been shaping up my response to the recent Productivity Commission Research Report …
A Policy of Splendid Isolation
The tension between British and Australian publishers has long been a central thesis of antipodean print culture histories.
10,175 Australian Novels?
Perhaps new empiricism, in its perceived relevance to Australian literature and the humanities in general, is a system of analysis that represents what Fredric Jameson lamented as the ‘depthlessness’ of postmodernism, privileging the consumption of visual images over deeper, critical forms of thinking?
Still Waters Run Deep
The nature of this article is to question the basis for the Sydney- and Melbourne-centric view of Australian literary production … but to do so from a regional state-by-state (and territory) statistical perspective.
Expended in An Hour, Gallipoli!
While Australians and New Zealanders acknowledge Anzac Day, it is important to look beyond modern perceptions and to review what our ancestors thought about the events which ultimately led to this national annual remembrance.
Neoliberalism
“[N]eoliberalism is simply an assertion that the unintended consequences obtained from the selfish acts of maximising individuals in the marketplace will produce the best outcome. [But] standing in the way of a society that democratically plans the satisfaction of human needs are the vested interests of those who profit from this circuit of capital.” Adam [...]
Branding Life
“[T]he production and consumption of culture have become imbued with commercial values and marketing messages. Brands have become the most powerful means of forming and spreading culture.” Clive Hamilton in The Freedom Paradox, 2008.
The Appetite for Abstractions
“The logic of the consumption of culture militates against the maintenance of the deep coherence of religious and cultural traditions. The vast appetite for things … requires that symbols, beliefs, and practices be removed from their original contexts. Their retrieval enables them to live on, but they are enacted within a fundamentally different logic. … [...]
eLearning: Fleshpots and Gunsights
Like Mark Twain’s stroll through Australia’s abbreviated history, the Internet has ‘acres of the most strange and fascinating things’.
Critical Foresight: Unfinished?
King Solomon once wrote that ‘where there is no vision the people perish’. [1] It is arguable that vision is a strong and necessary foundation in the building up of society, its members and the projects of civilisation. From this viewpoint it is not unreasonable to say that the vision or future envisioned differentiates the citizen, community or society from its peers. Different visions modify emotion, intellect, politics, vocation, ethics and behaviour in different ways. To act as an ombudsperson of these processes of modification — to ensure an expansion of options rather than an artificial narrowing — is an ambitious task. It is prudent then to expect generalisations of many kinds collecting around ‘vision’ and ‘future’ where critical and reflexive thinking of the kind described in previous chapters is not utilised. For example, statements of the nature below gather much attention in newspapers, radio broadcasts and publications.
Critical Foresight: New Ways
Hugh Mackay in Turning Point: Australians Choosing Their Future (1999) writes that ‘Attitudes are the symptoms of a society’s state of mind. They reveal our responses to the things that have happened to us and, occasionally, they offer a glimpse of the kind of future we are hoping for’.[2] Using a selection of personal interviews and group discussions which form the 1994 edition of The Mackay Report as representations of these ‘attitudes’ and interests of society, Mackay explores the notion that contemporary Australians are participants within a radical form of culture shift, one that ‘amounts to the discovery of a new way of thinking about Australia’.[3] Mackay’s identification and use of contradiction within these collective beliefs and evaluations of Australian citizens develops the theme of a ‘turning point’, that the dissonance existing between our value judgements about Australian socialisation articulates an emergent cultural identification with resolution or ‘turning point’. Such a ‘turning point’ is enacted by active citizenship: ‘This is the time’, Mackay writes in an inspirational tone, ‘for setting our goals and directions, but there’s no short cut to depth and maturity. We are still, in cultural terms, in our adolescence … [But] what’s wrong with being young? Why not relish the chance to shape our future; to create this Australia in our own image?’. [4]
Critical Foresight: Alt. Styles
Through this investigation of contemporary futurestext I argue that fragmentation of Australia’s future perspective along apocalyptic fault lines is most visible during the last decade of the twentieth century. Indeed, apocalyptic subjects exercise a strong influence over Australia’s internal styles of thinking about the future towards the close of the 1990s. During this period, many religious organisations through their publishing arms provided an intellectual justification and articulated account of their apocalyptic and endist positions that usually always opposed dominant cultural values of progress. The default view is to regard their accounts as positioned on the margins of society. Yet their styles of futures-thinking — which suggested a form of apocalyptic anticipation towards the times ahead — were produced and expressed within a specific historical, cultural and symbolic conjuncture of late twentieth century globalisation, postmodernism and pre-millennial apocalyptic expectation inclusive of society.
Critical Foresight: Anodyne Futures
To make a closer study of how uses of texts about the future are implicated in the construction of futures knowledges and subjectivities, a metalanguage is needed to provide an analysis of futures-thinking beyond the ‘insightful interpretation’ phase, a theorisation that brings ‘Australian studies’, ‘text’ and ‘future’ into new relations with each other under the field of AFS.
Critical Foresight: What is Time?
During the second half of the twentieth century, it was commonly accepted that ‘we can chart our future clearly and wisely only when we know the path which has led to the present’. [2] But if, as Stambaugh asserts, ‘temporality is … the occurrence, the taking place of thinking’, where thoughts and actions in time are contextualised by a taxonomy of tense, then any meaning, significance and value ascribed to the epochal moment like say the ‘turning of the millennium’ is a mere linguistic and imagined projection of our current prejudices, interests and concerns, and is in no way attached in any real sense to the advent itself. [3] In the words of metaphysical philosopher J R Lucas, ‘whereas the present and past are real, the future, as long as it is still future, is not’. [4] On this view, it may be reasonable to ask why it was fashionable during the late 1990s in Australia to gather futures around the number 2000?
Critical Foresight: The Present
The future is socially constructed; it is not an element of empirical reality. As with time in general, the future is constitutive of a social and cultural order. Our conception of time and modes of time keeping are also culturally specific. For Australian society does not regard time nor keep time in the same manner or form as say Indian or Chinese cultures. How Australians reckon the pattern of passing moments is culturally specific to a western scheme of calibration and temporality. Similarly, Australian responses and reactions to patterns of time reckoning are also culturally specific. In Australia, citizens are inculcated to react to socio-temporal cues like, say, Australia Day on January 26 or Anzac Day on April 25. Other cultures do not respond to these cues in the same way that Australians choose and are often required to. Responses to socio-temporal cues are learnt.
Critical Foresight: Introduction
Towards Critical Cultural Foresight addresses the manner in which knowledge of the future (or ‘futurestext’, that is, information positioned and empowered as being ‘relevant’ to the future and significant to the construction and formation of the ‘future’ subject) was created, propagated and given prominence in Australian culture and Australian Studies during the calendar move from the second to the third millennium. It argues that the future can be positioned as a text subject to various desires and uses and that from such positioning a form of apocalyptic thinking can be observed as a deep cultural process guiding interpretations of the future for Australians. Situated within the often overlooked discipline of Australian Studies, a field succinctly described by Ffion Murphy as ‘a discursive formation and cluster of theoretical and methodological strategies for scholarly inquiry into Australia’, [2] this thesis interrogates the politics behind processes actively inventing the future.
Just A Little Conflict Investment
I’m growing very tired of the superhero genre lately and its rather repetitive instances of urban gang warfare between chemical, genetic, extraterrestrial, supernatural or technologically-enhanced freaks. As Theodor Adorno might say, contemporary cinema is certainly providing the public with an “unconscious canon of what they do not want, that is, something different from what they are presently being fed”. How many times should we endure the same narrative structures and sequences, the same beats, the same super-augmented character battling it out with another super-powered character in a city or highway setting, throwing cars and people about like raging toddlers with their toys? It was innovative the first time in Superman 2 (1980) but after Hulk, Fantastic Four, X-Men 3, and now Ironman (and Edward Norton’s soon-to-be-released The Incredible Hulk), it seems probable that road rage is becoming the metaphor of our times and the lazy conflict device of contemporary cinema.
Australia, the Failed Idea?
The question on my mind this evening, the night before the Australian people evict John Howard from his seat of power, is: did the fake “Islamic Australian Federation” leaflet damage John Howard’s re-election campaign? For the record, I don’t really think so and certainly not anymore than say Pauline Hanson did in the late 1990s or the “Children Overboard” affair might have in 2001. After all, Mr Howard has eloquently side-stepped alleged links between himself and racist forms of thinking, via a kind of plausible deniability, while at the same time benefiting from the support of those voters who peddle a broad-spectrum racist sentiment. Given his election win in 2001 and subsequently in 2004, I’d wager that’s a lot of people who do. Sure, Mr Howard dissociates himself from the recent example and claims the leaflet is not part of his campaign. He even “condemned it” and “was appalled about it” while avoiding “some kind of personal responsibility”.
Articulating Our Selves Online
A mate and I had recently completed another quest in a massive multiplayer online game (MMOG). Or more accurately, I spent some more time in front my laptop clicking the left mouse-button and moving a collection of pixels that I had named as a character through a sequence of pre-configured animations (walking, running, charging, fighting, etc). This I did alongside another collection of pixels that my friend had named and because I could see his formation of pixels alongside my formation of pixels on my personal computer screen, I filled in the absences and tricked myself with the illusion that my mate and I were working pixels “together” on the same virtual space; like two people sharing a desktop but without requiring the physical presence of the other. I’m certain he felt the same 5,000 kilometres away.
Why Too Much Is Never Enough
“The blind eye is simply the path of least resistance. Without a firm conviction, any guilt that might arise from habitual consumption will dissipate in a self-imposed ambiguity.” Ben Scott in Culture Works, 2001.
Learning the Interface Value
Recently, I was introduced to the latest version of the massive multiplayer online product, World of Warcraft, and have occupied a few hours here and there late at night participating in gaming strategies which have involved rather odd tasks like “kill the mine trolls” or “collect eight red bandanas from the bandits”. For the uninitiated, World of Warcraft is not your standard addictive shoot-em up or racing-car game, where you might install software on your desktop, compete against the computer to finish certain missions and then connect to multiplayer servers where you can also play with or against other people in anonymous “death-matches”. Instead, World of Warcraft hosts a persistent, hugely populated (9 million users to date), enormous 3D synthetic world, with entire continents and cities themed in the fantasy genre, and people from all around the planet participate online by piloting their own individual computer-generated body.
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