tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-82441672672062070602024-03-05T16:35:38.668+11:00Eurhythmanianot drowning, oscillatingMichael Chttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03997773018535384710noreply@blogger.comBlogger182125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8244167267206207060.post-77938110837550449762015-03-21T15:55:00.004+11:002015-03-22T09:24:55.627+11:00Making Australia Great or Unbecoming-of-AgeWith George Megalogenis' TV history <i>Making Australia Great: Inside our Longest Boom</i> now being shown, questions concerning how to periodise and narrativise the boom's span of time are worth posing. Rarely, explicitly articulated as such, there is a body of hegemonic texts that use the tropes and structures of the coming-of-age narrative to tell the 1970s and 80s span of the national story. Given that <i>Making Australia Great</i> already appears to be taking its bearings from the text that did the most to embed a finance capitalist coming-of-age structure into Australian textuality--Paul Kelly's <i>The End of Certainty--</i>I think it's time to share my PhD as these issues are at the core of my work. You can access it <a href="https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B0a3V1DP-0vcSjdDM1duamtMYkE/view?usp=sharing" target="_blank">here</a><br />
<br />
Megalogenis' documentary is a political-cultural history that spans the period of around 1950 to 2013. As a history of politics and of culture interested in prime ministers, political economy and rock music, I'm very interested in the sorts of methods and arguments it will make, as this is common terrain to what I read, worked with and on.<br />
<br />
The first episode of three looked at the period spanning the pre-Whitlam era (c1965) and took us up to around 1986/7. Megalogenis had interview access to those Prime Ministers that were alive during filming (one, Malcolm Fraser PM 1975-1983 Liberal Party, passed away yesterday and Whitlam earlier this year), as well as a Reserve Bank Governor and other key political figures. This is a history from above, in one sense, as it is told largely through the understandings, and apparent consensus, of the main political leaders. The consensus mirrors the main narrative line of Paul Kelly's <i>The End of Certainty</i>: that Australian modernity was stillborn in the early twentieth century due to a five pillar Australian Settlement: protection in (white) race, (local manufacturing) tariffs and (white male) wages combined with state paternalism and imperial benevolence. The crumbling of this protectionist settlement, so this hegemonic national narrative goes, was due to the new global economic conditions that started to emerge in the late 1960s with the US de-coupling from the gold standard and the OPEC oil shocks. These shifts in global, post-war capitalism called out for new forms of political-economy, and a new political culture. It was during this situation that neo- or hyper- or turbo-liberalism gained a foothold. Kelly's narrative is not just about the changing world: it is also about the need for Australia to grow up, come of age and be economically mature and independent. My thesis challenges this orthodoxy.<br />
<br />
The other interesting element of Megalogenis' political cultural history, and the one that makes it resonate with my work on a similar period, albeit one that finishes in around 1998, is his use of 'culture'. With only one episode broadcast, it is perhaps too soon to tell how this cultural element will be handled overall, but the initial cultural emblems chosen--redundant cars, heavily unionised workforce, 'political' pub rock, and sporting successes--were, unfortunately, given a 'content' reading: their historical meaning was tied back to blunt sociological understandings of the 'times'. An example: Midnight Oil had an angry style that voiced youth opposition to Fraser's punitive government. This sort of sociological content analysis is fair enough on one level for a 1 hour show that needs to move quickly, but it illustrates the conclusion you have already reached without going through the music-cultural field or through the form of the songs, which is a much more interesting historical journey and much more revealing of what was at stake at the time. The documentary's focus on music is directed into a soundtrack, crystallising what political journalists refer to as 'the atmospherics' rather than as cultural phenomena that each have embedded historical information about how its aesthetics interacts with the culture of the time and the content inscribed in the lyrics.<br />
<br />
And yet the cultural analysis is interesting all the same, because there is a suggestion (maybe in the unconscious of the doco's choice of music and cultural artefacts) that the post-war (post-1945) culture had adhered around the post-war political-economy. Peter Beilharz has cheekily suggested we call this male, white, wage-earner culture Holdenism: a dry reference to Gramsci's concept of Fordism. In choosing the Leyland P76--this oversized, petrol guzzling, poorly engineered car--as one of the first episode's central tropes of the failed old ways of the Menzies period, Megalogenis' team have landed on a potent emblem of the forces acting on what I call the Labourist-social-liberal armature. Over the 1970s and 80s, this armature unwound, burnt-out, ceased to act as a force-field against which minority social movements defined themselves, was unable to support the fashioning of industrial citizens, failed to provide protection.<br />
<br />
This period then was marked by a war of times--of rhythms. The <i>Bildungsroman</i> (coming of age narrative form) offers a temporal solution to the arrhythmia of finance capitalism, the breakdown of the armature's regular beats, but this narrative solution relies on abjecting--deferring and displacing--a range of valuable social forms. How <i>Making Australia Great</i> deals with this war of times will be fascinating.<br />
<br />
I look forward to the next 2 episodes. The first can be viewed an ABC iView <a href="http://iview.abc.net.au/programs/making-australia-great-inside-our-longest-boom/DO1343V001S00" target="_blank">here</a><br />
<br />
<i>Unbecoming-of Age: Australian Grunge Fiction</i><br />
<i><br /></i>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
In recent years the term Neoliberalism, although increasingly contested, <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>has been central to understanding changes in global political life. Neoliberalism has been generally used to describe and explain the political-economic project that arose out of the Thatcher and Reagan governments in the UK and USA, and has come to be a defining concept with which to account for the Global Financial Crisis. In Australia, however, Neoliberalism is associated with the putatively left wing Australian Labor Party Bob Hawke and Paul Keating governments that held power for more than a decade: 1983 to 1996. This period has been termed the long Labor decade by sociologist Peter Beilharz, who argued that the ALP and the labour movement was fundamentally transformed over this period.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
In<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> Unbecoming-of-age</i>, this transformation of Labor and Labourism—its primary discourse—is explored through analysis of non-fictional and fictional narratives of the long Labor decade. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Unbecoming </i>explores how Australian Labourism was narrativised through three central figures and stories of the period: Gough Whitlam, Paul Keating and Paul Kelly’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The End of Certainty</i>. Analysing Whitlam as a spectre, biographies of Keating and his poetics, and Kelly’s journalistic political history as a <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Bildungsroman</i> of nation, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Unbecoming </i>draws out how Neoliberalism functioned via narrative techniques to become embedded in Australian textuality. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Unbecoming-of-age</i> then jumps tracks, moving from a literary analysis of political texts, to a political analysis of literary texts. This literary history interprets how the textuality of Neoliberalism functions within key texts of the long Labor decade, looking at the careers of two of Australia’s most political fictional writers: Frank Moorhouse and Amanda Lohrey. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Unbecoming </i>then turns to its central focus: Australian Grunge fiction. Through a close reading of Andrew McGahan’s first two novels, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Praise</i> and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">1988</i>, Christos Tsiolkas’ debut <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Loaded</i>, and three post-grunge novels: Andrew McCann’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Subtopia</i>, Elliot Perlman’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Three Dollars</i> and Anthony Macris’ <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Capital, volume one</i>, the analysis hones in on the literary infrastructure of the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Bildungsroman</i> narrative form and how each of these novels engages with this form of coming-of-age. The central argument here is that through the introduction of tropes of illness, abject conduct and forms of mobility that are out of time, these novels provide the resources for understanding how Neoliberalism was narrativised in Australia in the long Labor decade and, <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>importantly, how it might be worked through.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
Through this literary analysis of political culture and political analysis of literary culture, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Unbecoming-of-age</i> offers a new understanding of the experience of Neoliberalism as it affects everyday life and subjectivity.<o:p></o:p></div>
<br />Michael Chttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03997773018535384710noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8244167267206207060.post-19634302729493415882014-05-05T11:38:00.000+10:002014-05-05T11:38:01.819+10:00Just speculations--because you're worth it
<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
<o:DocumentProperties>
<o:Revision>0</o:Revision>
<o:TotalTime>0</o:TotalTime>
<o:Pages>1</o:Pages>
<o:Words>154</o:Words>
<o:Characters>935</o:Characters>
<o:Company>University of Tasmania</o:Company>
<o:Lines>17</o:Lines>
<o:Paragraphs>3</o:Paragraphs>
<o:CharactersWithSpaces>1086</o:CharactersWithSpaces>
<o:Version>14.0</o:Version>
</o:DocumentProperties>
<o:OfficeDocumentSettings>
<o:AllowPNG/>
</o:OfficeDocumentSettings>
</xml><![endif]-->
<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
<w:WordDocument>
<w:View>Normal</w:View>
<w:Zoom>0</w:Zoom>
<w:TrackMoves/>
<w:TrackFormatting/>
<w:PunctuationKerning/>
<w:ValidateAgainstSchemas/>
<w:SaveIfXMLInvalid>false</w:SaveIfXMLInvalid>
<w:IgnoreMixedContent>false</w:IgnoreMixedContent>
<w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText>false</w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText>
<w:DoNotPromoteQF/>
<w:LidThemeOther>EN-US</w:LidThemeOther>
<w:LidThemeAsian>JA</w:LidThemeAsian>
<w:LidThemeComplexScript>X-NONE</w:LidThemeComplexScript>
<w:Compatibility>
<w:BreakWrappedTables/>
<w:SnapToGridInCell/>
<w:WrapTextWithPunct/>
<w:UseAsianBreakRules/>
<w:DontGrowAutofit/>
<w:SplitPgBreakAndParaMark/>
<w:EnableOpenTypeKerning/>
<w:DontFlipMirrorIndents/>
<w:OverrideTableStyleHps/>
</w:Compatibility>
<m:mathPr>
<m:mathFont m:val="Cambria Math"/>
<m:brkBin m:val="before"/>
<m:brkBinSub m:val="--"/>
<m:smallFrac m:val="off"/>
<m:dispDef/>
<m:lMargin m:val="0"/>
<m:rMargin m:val="0"/>
<m:defJc m:val="centerGroup"/>
<m:wrapIndent m:val="1440"/>
<m:intLim m:val="subSup"/>
<m:naryLim m:val="undOvr"/>
</m:mathPr></w:WordDocument>
</xml><![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
<w:LatentStyles DefLockedState="false" DefUnhideWhenUsed="true"
DefSemiHidden="true" DefQFormat="false" DefPriority="99"
LatentStyleCount="276">
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="0" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" QFormat="true" Name="Normal"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="9" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" QFormat="true" Name="heading 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="9" QFormat="true" Name="heading 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="9" QFormat="true" Name="heading 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="9" QFormat="true" Name="heading 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="9" QFormat="true" Name="heading 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="9" QFormat="true" Name="heading 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="9" QFormat="true" Name="heading 7"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="9" QFormat="true" Name="heading 8"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="9" QFormat="true" Name="heading 9"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="39" Name="toc 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="39" Name="toc 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="39" Name="toc 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="39" Name="toc 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="39" Name="toc 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="39" Name="toc 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="39" Name="toc 7"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="39" Name="toc 8"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="39" Name="toc 9"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="35" QFormat="true" Name="caption"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="10" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" QFormat="true" Name="Title"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="1" Name="Default Paragraph Font"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="11" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" QFormat="true" Name="Subtitle"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="22" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" QFormat="true" Name="Strong"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="20" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" QFormat="true" Name="Emphasis"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="59" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Table Grid"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Placeholder Text"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="1" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" QFormat="true" Name="No Spacing"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="60" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Light Shading"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="61" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Light List"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="62" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Light Grid"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="63" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Shading 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="64" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Shading 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="65" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium List 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="66" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium List 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="67" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Grid 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="68" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Grid 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="69" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Grid 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="70" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Dark List"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="71" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Colorful Shading"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="72" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Colorful List"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="73" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Colorful Grid"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="60" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Light Shading Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="61" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Light List Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="62" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Light Grid Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="63" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Shading 1 Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="64" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Shading 2 Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="65" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium List 1 Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Revision"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="34" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" QFormat="true" Name="List Paragraph"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="29" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" QFormat="true" Name="Quote"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="30" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" QFormat="true" Name="Intense Quote"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="66" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium List 2 Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="67" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Grid 1 Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="68" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Grid 2 Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="69" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Grid 3 Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="70" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Dark List Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="71" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Colorful Shading Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="72" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Colorful List Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="73" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Colorful Grid Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="60" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Light Shading Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="61" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Light List Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="62" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Light Grid Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="63" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Shading 1 Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="64" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Shading 2 Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="65" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium List 1 Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="66" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium List 2 Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="67" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Grid 1 Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="68" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Grid 2 Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="69" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Grid 3 Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="70" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Dark List Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="71" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Colorful Shading Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="72" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Colorful List Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="73" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Colorful Grid Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="60" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Light Shading Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="61" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Light List Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="62" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Light Grid Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="63" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Shading 1 Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="64" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Shading 2 Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="65" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium List 1 Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="66" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium List 2 Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="67" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Grid 1 Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="68" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Grid 2 Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="69" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Grid 3 Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="70" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Dark List Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="71" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Colorful Shading Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="72" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Colorful List Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="73" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Colorful Grid Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="60" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Light Shading Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="61" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Light List Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="62" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Light Grid Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="63" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Shading 1 Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="64" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Shading 2 Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="65" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium List 1 Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="66" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium List 2 Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="67" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Grid 1 Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="68" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Grid 2 Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="69" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Grid 3 Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="70" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Dark List Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="71" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Colorful Shading Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="72" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Colorful List Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="73" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Colorful Grid Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="60" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Light Shading Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="61" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Light List Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="62" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Light Grid Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="63" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Shading 1 Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="64" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Shading 2 Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="65" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium List 1 Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="66" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium List 2 Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="67" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Grid 1 Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="68" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Grid 2 Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="69" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Grid 3 Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="70" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Dark List Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="71" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Colorful Shading Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="72" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Colorful List Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="73" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Colorful Grid Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="60" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Light Shading Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="61" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Light List Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="62" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Light Grid Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="63" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Shading 1 Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="64" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Shading 2 Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="65" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium List 1 Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="66" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium List 2 Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="67" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Grid 1 Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="68" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Grid 2 Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="69" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Grid 3 Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="70" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Dark List Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="71" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Colorful Shading Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="72" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Colorful List Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="73" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Colorful Grid Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="19" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" QFormat="true" Name="Subtle Emphasis"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="21" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" QFormat="true" Name="Intense Emphasis"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="31" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" QFormat="true" Name="Subtle Reference"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="32" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" QFormat="true" Name="Intense Reference"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="33" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" QFormat="true" Name="Book Title"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="37" Name="Bibliography"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="39" QFormat="true" Name="TOC Heading"/>
</w:LatentStyles>
</xml><![endif]-->
<!--[if gte mso 10]>
<style>
/* Style Definitions */
table.MsoNormalTable
{mso-style-name:"Table Normal";
mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0;
mso-tstyle-colband-size:0;
mso-style-noshow:yes;
mso-style-priority:99;
mso-style-parent:"";
mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt;
mso-para-margin:0cm;
mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt;
mso-pagination:widow-orphan;
font-size:12.0pt;
font-family:Cambria;
mso-ascii-font-family:Cambria;
mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin;
mso-hansi-font-family:Cambria;
mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;
mso-ansi-language:EN-US;}
</style>
<![endif]-->
<!--StartFragment-->
<!--EndFragment--><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">The
awareness that early readings of the crisis were above all misreadings has only
motivated a further retreat into a style of thought that is singularly
incapable of critically penetrating the workings of neoliberalism: the more
apparent the tremendous affective force that neoliberalism derives from a
politics of ignorance, the more progressive scholarship and commentary retreat
into a fantasy of social critique as a kind of neutral, depoliticized
fact-checking exercise. That is, the more neoliberalism is capable of making
productive use of the limits of knowledge, the more its critique becomes
invested in the notion of positive knowledge and of uncertainty as an external
limit to it, thereby foreclosing the possibility of critically engaging
neoliberalism’s ability to make speculation productive. This is what accounts
for the paradoxical sense in which the progressive– liberal attachment to
objective facts and neutral debate is so moralistic: it disavows the very
speculative operations from which neoliberalism derives its strength. That is
Hayekian agnotology at work.</span></blockquote>
<br />
<a href="http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/17530350.2014.909866#.U2bjS9whTG4">'Hoodwinked by Hayek' Martijn Konings book review of Philip Mirowksi <i>Never Let a Serious Crisis go to Waste</i>. <i>Journal of Cultural Economy</i> March 2014</a><br />
<br />
Is the basis of a revived left a project to make speculation just and equitable? Michel Feher is building a case for Investee Activism in his Goldsmith lectures on the Neoliberal Condition. What real opportunities can there be for all people to be who and what they have reason to value? (Sen's capability maxim). If speculation is just and equitable, then will it need to take account of the real opportunities that it produces?<br />
<br />
Feher is also making an argument that Neoliberal governmentality has embedded a new human condition. This new human condition is both the object of and presupposes that people, as human capital, need to be empowered to appreciate themselves: to grow their credit. Are there then <i>just </i>limits to self-appreciation? Do some forms of self-appreciation/ self-esteem over-extend the credit one is due, or demands, via excesses of self-speculation? Do the real opportunities some people have to be and do what they have reason to value diminish the stock of real opportunities that others could draw on?Michael Chttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03997773018535384710noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8244167267206207060.post-4096375504873316642014-03-15T15:04:00.001+11:002014-03-15T15:04:19.539+11:00The Neoliberal Condition and its predecessors: Redemption, Fulfilment, Appreciation--Michel Feher--Notes
<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
<o:DocumentProperties>
<o:Revision>0</o:Revision>
<o:TotalTime>0</o:TotalTime>
<o:Pages>1</o:Pages>
<o:Words>2524</o:Words>
<o:Characters>14387</o:Characters>
<o:Company>University of Tasmania</o:Company>
<o:Lines>119</o:Lines>
<o:Paragraphs>33</o:Paragraphs>
<o:CharactersWithSpaces>16878</o:CharactersWithSpaces>
<o:Version>14.0</o:Version>
</o:DocumentProperties>
<o:OfficeDocumentSettings>
<o:AllowPNG/>
</o:OfficeDocumentSettings>
</xml><![endif]-->
<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
<w:WordDocument>
<w:View>Normal</w:View>
<w:Zoom>0</w:Zoom>
<w:TrackMoves/>
<w:TrackFormatting/>
<w:PunctuationKerning/>
<w:ValidateAgainstSchemas/>
<w:SaveIfXMLInvalid>false</w:SaveIfXMLInvalid>
<w:IgnoreMixedContent>false</w:IgnoreMixedContent>
<w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText>false</w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText>
<w:DoNotPromoteQF/>
<w:LidThemeOther>EN-US</w:LidThemeOther>
<w:LidThemeAsian>JA</w:LidThemeAsian>
<w:LidThemeComplexScript>X-NONE</w:LidThemeComplexScript>
<w:Compatibility>
<w:BreakWrappedTables/>
<w:SnapToGridInCell/>
<w:WrapTextWithPunct/>
<w:UseAsianBreakRules/>
<w:DontGrowAutofit/>
<w:SplitPgBreakAndParaMark/>
<w:EnableOpenTypeKerning/>
<w:DontFlipMirrorIndents/>
<w:OverrideTableStyleHps/>
<w:UseFELayout/>
</w:Compatibility>
<m:mathPr>
<m:mathFont m:val="Cambria Math"/>
<m:brkBin m:val="before"/>
<m:brkBinSub m:val="--"/>
<m:smallFrac m:val="off"/>
<m:dispDef/>
<m:lMargin m:val="0"/>
<m:rMargin m:val="0"/>
<m:defJc m:val="centerGroup"/>
<m:wrapIndent m:val="1440"/>
<m:intLim m:val="subSup"/>
<m:naryLim m:val="undOvr"/>
</m:mathPr></w:WordDocument>
</xml><![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
<w:LatentStyles DefLockedState="false" DefUnhideWhenUsed="true"
DefSemiHidden="true" DefQFormat="false" DefPriority="99"
LatentStyleCount="276">
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="0" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" QFormat="true" Name="Normal"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="9" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" QFormat="true" Name="heading 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="9" QFormat="true" Name="heading 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="9" QFormat="true" Name="heading 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="9" QFormat="true" Name="heading 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="9" QFormat="true" Name="heading 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="9" QFormat="true" Name="heading 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="9" QFormat="true" Name="heading 7"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="9" QFormat="true" Name="heading 8"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="9" QFormat="true" Name="heading 9"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="39" Name="toc 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="39" Name="toc 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="39" Name="toc 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="39" Name="toc 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="39" Name="toc 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="39" Name="toc 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="39" Name="toc 7"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="39" Name="toc 8"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="39" Name="toc 9"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="35" QFormat="true" Name="caption"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="10" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" QFormat="true" Name="Title"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="1" Name="Default Paragraph Font"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="11" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" QFormat="true" Name="Subtitle"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="22" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" QFormat="true" Name="Strong"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="20" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" QFormat="true" Name="Emphasis"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="59" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Table Grid"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Placeholder Text"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="1" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" QFormat="true" Name="No Spacing"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="60" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Light Shading"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="61" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Light List"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="62" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Light Grid"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="63" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Shading 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="64" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Shading 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="65" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium List 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="66" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium List 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="67" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Grid 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="68" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Grid 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="69" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Grid 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="70" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Dark List"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="71" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Colorful Shading"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="72" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Colorful List"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="73" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Colorful Grid"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="60" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Light Shading Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="61" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Light List Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="62" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Light Grid Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="63" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Shading 1 Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="64" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Shading 2 Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="65" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium List 1 Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Revision"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="34" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" QFormat="true" Name="List Paragraph"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="29" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" QFormat="true" Name="Quote"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="30" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" QFormat="true" Name="Intense Quote"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="66" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium List 2 Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="67" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Grid 1 Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="68" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Grid 2 Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="69" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Grid 3 Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="70" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Dark List Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="71" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Colorful Shading Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="72" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Colorful List Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="73" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Colorful Grid Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="60" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Light Shading Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="61" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Light List Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="62" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Light Grid Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="63" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Shading 1 Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="64" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Shading 2 Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="65" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium List 1 Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="66" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium List 2 Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="67" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Grid 1 Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="68" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Grid 2 Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="69" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Grid 3 Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="70" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Dark List Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="71" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Colorful Shading Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="72" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Colorful List Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="73" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Colorful Grid Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="60" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Light Shading Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="61" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Light List Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="62" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Light Grid Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="63" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Shading 1 Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="64" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Shading 2 Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="65" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium List 1 Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="66" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium List 2 Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="67" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Grid 1 Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="68" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Grid 2 Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="69" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Grid 3 Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="70" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Dark List Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="71" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Colorful Shading Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="72" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Colorful List Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="73" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Colorful Grid Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="60" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Light Shading Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="61" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Light List Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="62" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Light Grid Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="63" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Shading 1 Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="64" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Shading 2 Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="65" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium List 1 Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="66" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium List 2 Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="67" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Grid 1 Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="68" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Grid 2 Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="69" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Grid 3 Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="70" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Dark List Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="71" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Colorful Shading Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="72" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Colorful List Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="73" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Colorful Grid Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="60" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Light Shading Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="61" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Light List Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="62" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Light Grid Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="63" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Shading 1 Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="64" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Shading 2 Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="65" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium List 1 Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="66" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium List 2 Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="67" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Grid 1 Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="68" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Grid 2 Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="69" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Grid 3 Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="70" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Dark List Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="71" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Colorful Shading Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="72" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Colorful List Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="73" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Colorful Grid Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="60" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Light Shading Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="61" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Light List Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="62" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Light Grid Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="63" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Shading 1 Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="64" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Shading 2 Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="65" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium List 1 Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="66" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium List 2 Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="67" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Grid 1 Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="68" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Grid 2 Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="69" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Grid 3 Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="70" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Dark List Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="71" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Colorful Shading Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="72" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Colorful List Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="73" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Colorful Grid Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="19" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" QFormat="true" Name="Subtle Emphasis"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="21" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" QFormat="true" Name="Intense Emphasis"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="31" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" QFormat="true" Name="Subtle Reference"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="32" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" QFormat="true" Name="Intense Reference"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="33" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" QFormat="true" Name="Book Title"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="37" Name="Bibliography"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="39" QFormat="true" Name="TOC Heading"/>
</w:LatentStyles>
</xml><![endif]-->
<!--[if gte mso 10]>
<style>
/* Style Definitions */
table.MsoNormalTable
{mso-style-name:"Table Normal";
mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0;
mso-tstyle-colband-size:0;
mso-style-noshow:yes;
mso-style-priority:99;
mso-style-parent:"";
mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt;
mso-para-margin:0cm;
mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt;
mso-pagination:widow-orphan;
font-size:12.0pt;
font-family:Cambria;
mso-ascii-font-family:Cambria;
mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin;
mso-hansi-font-family:Cambria;
mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;
mso-ansi-language:EN-US;}
</style>
<![endif]-->
<!--StartFragment-->
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">My notes from Lecture
1 ‘The Neoliberal Condition and its predecessors: Redemption, Fulfilment,
Appreciation’ 2013<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">Michel
Feher lectures—The Neoliberal Condition Goldsmiths London<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">Outline
of lectures<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst" style="line-height: 115%; mso-list: l14 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -18.0pt;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Gill Sans MT"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">1.<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 7pt; line-height: normal;"> </span></span><!--[endif]--><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">The precursors of the Neoliberal
Condition <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 115%; margin-left: 72.0pt; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l25 level1 lfo2; text-indent: -18.0pt;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Symbol; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;">·<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 7pt; line-height: normal;">
</span></span><!--[endif]--><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">The
Augustinian Condition and Pastoral Power C5th AD to C17th AD. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 115%; margin-left: 108.0pt; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l25 level2 lfo2; text-indent: -18.0pt;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Courier New"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Courier New";">o<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 7pt; line-height: normal;">
</span></span><!--[endif]--><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">Good
disposition=charity. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 115%; margin-left: 108.0pt; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l25 level2 lfo2; text-indent: -18.0pt;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Courier New"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Courier New";">o<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 7pt; line-height: normal;">
</span></span><!--[endif]--><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">Bad
disposition=cupidity/ desire<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 115%; margin-left: 72.0pt; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l25 level1 lfo2; text-indent: -18.0pt;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Symbol; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;">·<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 7pt; line-height: normal;">
</span></span><!--[endif]--><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">The
Liberal Condition C18th AD. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 115%; margin-left: 108.0pt; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l25 level2 lfo2; text-indent: -18.0pt;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Courier New"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Courier New";">o<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 7pt; line-height: normal;">
</span></span><!--[endif]--><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">Good
disposition=yearning to pursue one’s interests rationally and be recognised as
praiseworthy. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 115%; margin-left: 108.0pt; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l25 level2 lfo2; text-indent: -18.0pt;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Courier New"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Courier New";">o<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 7pt; line-height: normal;">
</span></span><!--[endif]--><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">Bad
disposition=Passions- violent, rash, inconsistent<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 115%; mso-list: l14 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -18.0pt;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Gill Sans MT"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">2.<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 7pt; line-height: normal;"> </span></span><!--[endif]--><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">Shift from Liberal to Neoliberal
economy. From profit to credit<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 115%; mso-list: l14 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -18.0pt;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Gill Sans MT"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">3.<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 7pt; line-height: normal;"> </span></span><!--[endif]--><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">Shift from Liberal to Neoliberal
psychology<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 115%; margin-left: 72.0pt; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l14 level2 lfo1; text-indent: -18.0pt;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Gill Sans MT"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">a.<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 7pt; line-height: normal;"> </span></span><!--[endif]--><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">Liberal subject seeks to optimize
satisfaction: from want to fulfilment<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 115%; margin-left: 72.0pt; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l14 level2 lfo1; text-indent: -18.0pt;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Gill Sans MT"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">b.<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 7pt; line-height: normal;"> </span></span><!--[endif]--><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">Neoliberal subject seeks to
maximize self-esteem: from self-hatred to self-appreciation, making the NLS
(Neoliberal subject) vulnerable, opposed to the ‘wanting’ Liberal subject.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 115%; mso-list: l14 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -18.0pt;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Gill Sans MT"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">4.<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 7pt; line-height: normal;"> </span></span><!--[endif]--><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">Social and love life of L and NL
subject. Shift in sociality<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 115%; margin-left: 72.0pt; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l14 level2 lfo1; text-indent: -18.0pt;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Gill Sans MT"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">a.<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 7pt; line-height: normal;"> </span></span><!--[endif]--><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">Liberal subject is subject of
exchange: interested and disinterested<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpLast" style="line-height: 115%; margin-left: 72.0pt; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l14 level2 lfo1; text-indent: -18.0pt;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Gill Sans MT"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">b.<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 7pt; line-height: normal;"> </span></span><!--[endif]--><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">NLS is subject of sharing: credit
and (debt?) ‘Credit is bound to self-esteem in same way that profit is bound to
satisfaction’<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">(Lectures 5 + 6 not outlined)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<b><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">Introduction<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<b><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">The NLC (Neoliberal
Condition)<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">2 central propositions put forward in the lectures:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst" style="line-height: 115%; mso-list: l11 level1 lfo4; text-indent: -18.0pt;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Gill Sans MT"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">1.<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 7pt; line-height: normal;"> </span></span><!--[endif]--><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">Ascertaining the existence of the
NLC<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 115%; margin-left: 72.0pt; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l18 level1 lfo3; text-indent: -18.0pt;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Symbol; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;">·<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 7pt; line-height: normal;">
</span></span><!--[endif]--><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">Past
30 yrs transformed statecraft/ coporate governance and personal motivation and
conduct<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 115%; mso-list: l11 level1 lfo4; text-indent: -18.0pt;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Gill Sans MT"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">2.<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 7pt; line-height: normal;"> </span></span><!--[endif]--><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">Embracing the NLC as means to
resist and fight current NL policies. Turn key practices and concepts to social
aims. Must recognise how resilient Neoliberalism has been, even after 2008
financial crash. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpLast" style="line-height: 115%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<b><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">Neoliberalism<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">The terms belongs to the foes and critics of Neoliberalism<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">Alexnader Rustov coined term c1938 Walter Lippmann Conference<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">Key NL figures did not use term to identify their approaches/
theories: <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst" style="line-height: 115%; margin-left: 72.0pt; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l18 level1 lfo3; text-indent: -18.0pt;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Symbol; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;">·<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 7pt; line-height: normal;">
</span></span><!--[endif]--><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">Milton
Freidman saw himself as laissez faire, old style classical Liberal<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpLast" style="line-height: 115%; margin-left: 72.0pt; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l18 level1 lfo3; text-indent: -18.0pt;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Symbol; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;">·<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 7pt; line-height: normal;">
</span></span><!--[endif]--><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">von
Hayek saw himself as an old whig<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">Term reappeared with Balir/ Clinton 3<sup>rd</sup>
way—indicates they didn’t know its history<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">Neoliberalism as term only used today by critics, yet amongst
these critics there is no agreement about what it is:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst" style="line-height: 115%; mso-list: l3 level1 lfo5; text-indent: -18.0pt;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Gill Sans MT"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">1.<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 7pt; line-height: normal;"> </span></span><!--[endif]--><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">A return to pre-welfare state
capitalism. Dismantlement of post-war Fordism<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 115%; mso-list: l3 level1 lfo5; text-indent: -18.0pt;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Gill Sans MT"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">2.<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 7pt; line-height: normal;"> </span></span><!--[endif]--><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">‘Neo’ refers to a set of new
practices and concepts (Feher identifies with this approach). 4 major changes:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpLast" style="line-height: 115%; margin-left: 72.0pt; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l3 level2 lfo5; text-indent: -18.0pt;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Gill Sans MT"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">a.<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 7pt; line-height: normal;"> </span></span><!--[endif]--><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">Financialisation<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin-left: 90.0pt;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">Rise of financial markets<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin-left: 90.0pt;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">Deregulation of these markets—FK
(Financial Capital) circulates globally and across institutions<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin-left: 90.0pt;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">Innovative financial engineering
eg derivatives<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraph" style="line-height: 115%; margin-left: 72.0pt; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l3 level2 lfo5; text-indent: -18.0pt;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Gill Sans MT"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">b.<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 7pt; line-height: normal;"> </span></span><!--[endif]--><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">Transformation in corporate
governance<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin-left: 90.0pt;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">Creating value for
shareholders—new phenomenon late 1970s/80s<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraph" style="line-height: 115%; margin-left: 72.0pt; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l3 level2 lfo5; text-indent: -18.0pt;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Gill Sans MT"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">c.<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 7pt; line-height: normal;"> </span></span><!--[endif]--><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">New Public Managament<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin-left: 90.0pt;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">Transformation in statecraft:
state is managed the way corporations are managed now.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin-left: 90.0pt;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">As sharholders are for
corporations, the bondholders are for states. State is accountable, in final
instance, to bondholders as corporations are to shareholders.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraph" style="line-height: 115%; margin-left: 72.0pt; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l3 level2 lfo5; text-indent: -18.0pt;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Gill Sans MT"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">d.<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 7pt; line-height: normal;"> </span></span><!--[endif]--><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">Workfare<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin-left: 90.0pt;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">Replaced/ replacing welfare<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin-left: 90.0pt;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">Social programs to help people
‘return’ to work<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin-left: 90.0pt;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">Aim no longer full employment but
employability. From being employed to being employable<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraph" style="line-height: 115%; mso-list: l3 level1 lfo5; text-indent: -18.0pt;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Gill Sans MT"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">3.<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 7pt; line-height: normal;"> </span></span><!--[endif]--><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">Our condition has changed
—subjective form, personal motivation and conduct. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin-left: 36.0pt;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">Foucault BOBP (Birth of Biopolitics
1979): Neoliberalism is radically new—a subjective
transformation—self-entrepreneur: entrepreneur of oneself<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin-left: 36.0pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin-left: 36.0pt;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">Feher will lean heavily of
Foucault in the lectures but his (Feher’s) view is informed by dominance of
Financialization: self as entrepreneur is obselete replaced by self as
portfolio manager (portfolio of conducts)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst" style="line-height: 115%; margin-left: 54.0pt; mso-add-space: auto;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 115%; margin-left: 0cm; mso-add-space: auto;">
<b><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">Neoliberal Condition<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 115%; margin-left: 0cm; mso-add-space: auto;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">Neoliberalism
brings a representation of the human condition with it<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 115%; margin-left: 0cm; mso-add-space: auto;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">Every
mode of government is sustained, is articulated, is predictaed on a certain
representation of the human condition<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 115%; margin-left: 0cm; mso-add-space: auto;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">(Leaning
heavily of Foucault for the following)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 115%; margin-left: 0cm; mso-add-space: auto;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 115%; margin-left: 0cm; mso-add-space: auto;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 115%; margin-left: 0cm; mso-add-space: auto;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 115%; margin-left: 0cm; mso-add-space: auto;">
<i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">2 kinds of power in the West </span></i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">(Foucault)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 115%; mso-list: l19 level1 lfo6; text-indent: -18.0pt;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Gill Sans MT"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">1.<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 7pt; line-height: normal;"> </span></span><!--[endif]--><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">Sovereign power—sovereignty<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 115%; margin-left: 72.0pt; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l17 level1 lfo7; text-indent: -18.0pt;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Symbol; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;">·<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 7pt; line-height: normal;">
</span></span><!--[endif]--><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">Power
to take and redistribute—a special right belonging to the sovereign<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 115%; margin-left: 72.0pt; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l17 level1 lfo7; text-indent: -18.0pt;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Symbol; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;">·<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 7pt; line-height: normal;">
</span></span><!--[endif]--><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">Power
to levy and reallocate/ confiscate and redistribute/ take and give back/ kill
and give grace/ tax and redistribute<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 115%; mso-list: l19 level1 lfo6; text-indent: -18.0pt;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Gill Sans MT"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">2.<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 7pt; line-height: normal;"> </span></span><!--[endif]--><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">Government power—governmentality<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 115%; margin-left: 72.0pt; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l10 level1 lfo8; text-indent: -18.0pt;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Symbol; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;">·<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 7pt; line-height: normal;">
</span></span><!--[endif]--><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">Acting
on people’s action rather than taking and giving back<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 115%; margin-left: 72.0pt; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l10 level1 lfo8; text-indent: -18.0pt;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Symbol; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;">·<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 7pt; line-height: normal;">
</span></span><!--[endif]--><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">Modifying
people’s conduct to certain ends/ goals eg pastoral power: Priest seeks to
modify conduct of faithful to being about their salvation.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 115%; margin-left: 72.0pt; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l10 level1 lfo8; text-indent: -18.0pt;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Symbol; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;">·<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 7pt; line-height: normal;">
</span></span><!--[endif]--><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">In
Medieval/ early renaissance (C12th) period, power of the church is exceeded.
Pastoral power expands beyond the church<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpLast" style="line-height: 115%; margin-left: 72.0pt; mso-add-space: auto;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">Legitimations<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst" style="line-height: 115%; mso-list: l8 level1 lfo9; text-indent: -18.0pt;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Gill Sans MT"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">1.<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 7pt; line-height: normal;"> </span></span><!--[endif]--><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">Sovereign power: ruler has
special quality/ God’s mandate/ popular mandate<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpLast" style="line-height: 115%; mso-list: l8 level1 lfo9; text-indent: -18.0pt;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Gill Sans MT"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">2.<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 7pt; line-height: normal;"> </span></span><!--[endif]--><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">Government: is needed because of
the special defect(s) of the governed as they are not able to govern
themselves. These defects are known because of the ‘natural’ propensities in
each historical instance of the human condition—natural, spontaneous
propensities in people in their pre-governed state/ condition. This makes
government necessary and possible/ justified and effective.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">Good and bad dispositions<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">Forms of government presuppose a human condition, and a human
condition presupposes a form of government. Government implies that people have
two types of inclinations/ propensities/ dispositions:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraph" style="line-height: 115%; margin-left: 54.0pt; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l12 level1 lfo10; text-indent: -18.0pt;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Gill Sans MT"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">1.<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 7pt; line-height: normal;"> </span></span><!--[endif]--><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">Bad propensities<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin-left: 54.0pt;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">These make it impossible for a
subject/ person to govern themselves without help/ governmental intervention<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraph" style="line-height: 115%; margin-left: 54.0pt; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l12 level1 lfo10; text-indent: -18.0pt;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Gill Sans MT"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">2.<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 7pt; line-height: normal;"> </span></span><!--[endif]--><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">Good propensities<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin-left: 54.0pt;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">Show governing is possible and
necessary. Tells you what good government is and does<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin-left: 54.0pt;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">Good govt. enhances and
stimulatesgood dispositions and wards off bad ones.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst" style="line-height: 115%; margin-left: 0cm; mso-add-space: auto;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">If there
are only bad propensities then government might be necessary but good
government would be impossible. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 115%; margin-left: 0cm; mso-add-space: auto;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 115%; margin-left: 0cm; mso-add-space: auto;">
<i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">Representation of the Human Condition (HC)<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 115%; margin-left: 0cm; mso-add-space: auto;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">Not
ideologies produced by governments to justify what they do<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 115%; margin-left: 0cm; mso-add-space: auto;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">Rather,
govt. and HC are a relationshop of mutual presuppositions: Govt and HC
presuppose and lean on each other<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 115%; margin-left: 0cm; mso-add-space: auto;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 115%; margin-left: 0cm; mso-add-space: auto;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">A certain
representation of the HC can be raised to justify a mode or government <b><i>and </i></b>to
criticise it—Feher’s strategy throughout the lecture series will be to use key
elements of the Neoliberal Condition (the Neoliberal instantiation of the Human
Condition) to critique and show a way through Neoliberal Government.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 115%; margin-left: 0cm; mso-add-space: auto;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 115%; margin-left: 0cm; mso-add-space: auto;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">The NLC
is a new representation of the Human Condition: the correlative of the
Neoliberal mode of government.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 115%; margin-left: 0cm; mso-add-space: auto;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 115%; margin-left: 0cm; mso-add-space: auto;">
<b><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">Major shifts in representations of the Human
Condition<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 115%; margin-left: 0cm; mso-add-space: auto;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 115%; margin-left: 0cm; mso-add-space: auto;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">2 major
shifts since 5<sup>th</sup> Century AD<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 115%; margin-left: 54.0pt; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l6 level1 lfo11; text-indent: -18.0pt;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Gill Sans MT"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">1.<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 7pt; line-height: normal;"> </span></span><!--[endif]--><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">The Augustinian Condition and Pastoral
Power C5th to C17th AD.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 115%; margin-left: 90.0pt; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l6 level2 lfo11; text-indent: -18.0pt;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Gill Sans MT"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">a.<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 7pt; line-height: normal;"> </span></span><!--[endif]--><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">Good
disposition=charity—yearning/ desire to give<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 115%; margin-left: 90.0pt; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l6 level2 lfo11; text-indent: -18.0pt;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Gill Sans MT"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">b.<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 7pt; line-height: normal;"> </span></span><!--[endif]--><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">Bad disposition=cupidity/ desire<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpLast" style="line-height: 115%; margin-left: 54.0pt; mso-add-space: auto;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">This
representation of the HC, challenged and accommodated over this period<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst" style="line-height: 115%; margin-left: 54.0pt; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l6 level1 lfo11; text-indent: -18.0pt;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Gill Sans MT"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">2.<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 7pt; line-height: normal;"> </span></span><!--[endif]--><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">The Liberal Condition C18th AD. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 115%; margin-left: 90.0pt; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l13 level1 lfo12; text-indent: -18.0pt;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Gill Sans MT"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">a.<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 7pt; line-height: normal;"> </span></span><!--[endif]--><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">Good disposition=yearning to
pursue one’s interests rationally and be recognised as praiseworthy. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 115%; margin-left: 90.0pt; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l13 level1 lfo12; text-indent: -18.0pt;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Gill Sans MT"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">b.<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 7pt; line-height: normal;"> </span></span><!--[endif]--><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">Bad disposition=Passions—violent,
rash, inconsistent<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 115%; margin-left: 90.0pt; mso-add-space: auto;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 115%; margin-left: 54.0pt; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l6 level1 lfo11; text-indent: -18.0pt;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Gill Sans MT"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">3.<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 7pt; line-height: normal;"> </span></span><!--[endif]--><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">The Neoliberal Condition late
1970s/ 80s<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 115%; margin-left: 90.0pt; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l6 level2 lfo11; text-indent: -18.0pt;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Gill Sans MT"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">a.<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 7pt; line-height: normal;"> </span></span><!--[endif]--><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">Good disposition=Self-appreciation<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 115%; margin-left: 90.0pt; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l6 level2 lfo11; text-indent: -18.0pt;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Gill Sans MT"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">b.<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 7pt; line-height: normal;"> </span></span><!--[endif]--><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">Bad disposition=Self-loathing<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 115%; margin-left: 90.0pt; mso-add-space: auto;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 115%; margin-left: 0cm; mso-add-space: auto;">
<b><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">The Augustinian Condition<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpLast" style="line-height: 115%; margin-left: 0cm; mso-add-space: auto;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">Pelagian Controversy<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">Augustine responding to the Pelagian controvery c411—422 AD<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">Pelagius (390-418) Christian aristocrats merged Hellenist/classical
ideals with Christianity—God Given scriptures + free will. Challenged the
pastoral power of the church.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">Classical and Hellenistic world<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">Source of evil is external<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">Men (and subject=men-citizens) are endangered by fate/ fortuna/
hazzard/ matter the devil.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">A pure soul beset by external dangers and internal appetites/
senses/ fantasies.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">Kernel of soul remained pure/ rational.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">This part needed to dominate the lower, bodily part. Need
self-mastery—autonomy from outside attack. Purify the self. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">Aim: redemption/ salvation<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">Augustine’s human condition:
cupidity and charity<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">Reinterprets the Fall: HC is original sin<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">We are ruled by cupiditas—utterly infected by original sin/
nothing good in us/ nothing that we can save<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">Only good that is in us is the charity that God has put in our
hearts—we can access it, but it’s not ours—it’s his<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">Cupidity</span></i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">—insatiable, ungovernable and
irrepressible desires.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst" style="line-height: 115%; margin-left: 54.0pt; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l24 level1 lfo13; text-indent: -18.0pt;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Symbol; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;">·<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 7pt; line-height: normal;">
</span></span><!--[endif]--><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">Can’t
be vanquished—they are too strong<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 115%; margin-left: 54.0pt; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l24 level1 lfo13; text-indent: -18.0pt;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Symbol; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;">·<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 7pt; line-height: normal;">
</span></span><!--[endif]--><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">Lust—desire
for pleasure<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 115%; margin-left: 54.0pt; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l24 level1 lfo13; text-indent: -18.0pt;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Symbol; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;">·<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 7pt; line-height: normal;">
</span></span><!--[endif]--><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">Greed—desire
for possession<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpLast" style="line-height: 115%; margin-left: 54.0pt; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l24 level1 lfo13; text-indent: -18.0pt;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Symbol; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;">·<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 7pt; line-height: normal;">
</span></span><!--[endif]--><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">Pride—desire
for domination<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">How to access charity when cupidity is overwhelming?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">2 ways—realise we are slave to desires: <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst" style="line-height: 115%; margin-left: 54.0pt; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l1 level1 lfo15; text-indent: -18.0pt;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Gill Sans MT"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">1.<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 7pt; line-height: normal;"> </span></span><!--[endif]--><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">Pride of Adam<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 115%; margin-left: 72.0pt; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l9 level1 lfo14; text-indent: -18.0pt;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Symbol; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;">·<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 7pt; line-height: normal;">
</span></span><!--[endif]--><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">try
to control=libertine response<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 115%; margin-left: 72.0pt; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l9 level1 lfo14; text-indent: -18.0pt;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Symbol; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;">·<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 7pt; line-height: normal;">
</span></span><!--[endif]--><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">try
to eliminate=ascetic response<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 115%; margin-left: 54.0pt; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l1 level1 lfo15; text-indent: -18.0pt;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Gill Sans MT"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">2.<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 7pt; line-height: normal;"> </span></span><!--[endif]--><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">Humility<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 115%; margin-left: 72.0pt; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l22 level1 lfo16; text-indent: -18.0pt;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Symbol; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;">·<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 7pt; line-height: normal;">
</span></span><!--[endif]--><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">Realise
you are a slave and humbled before desires. In this state of humiliation, God’s
love can enter from the outside. God loves you for the desire soaked, wretch
you are. You are awed and humbled. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 115%; margin-left: 72.0pt; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l22 level1 lfo16; text-indent: -18.0pt;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Symbol; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;">·<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 7pt; line-height: normal;">
</span></span><!--[endif]--><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">You
cultivate your humility</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Wingdings; mso-ascii-font-family: "Gill Sans MT"; mso-char-type: symbol; mso-hansi-font-family: "Gill Sans MT"; mso-symbol-font-family: Wingdings;">à</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">gratitude</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Wingdings; mso-ascii-font-family: "Gill Sans MT"; mso-char-type: symbol; mso-hansi-font-family: "Gill Sans MT"; mso-symbol-font-family: Wingdings;">à</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">access to charity<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpLast" style="line-height: 115%; margin-left: 72.0pt; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l22 level1 lfo16; text-indent: -18.0pt;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Symbol; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;">·<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 7pt; line-height: normal;">
</span></span><!--[endif]--><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">Charity
is gift of God—countervailling power to give—giving to others with no regard
for own satisfaction<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">Charity<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">Charity expresses piety and love neighbour because unlike God,
neighbours are very hard to love.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">Cultivating humility is core of Augustinian ethics—how to
access charity<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">Augustinian Pastoral Government<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">Priests govern flock via cultivating humility to escape nature<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">Becomes general mode of ethics by C12th<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">Because most people too fallen to being to be humble, only
clergy to have access<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">Late C11th to early C 12<sup>th</sup>
economic development </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Wingdings; mso-ascii-font-family: "Gill Sans MT"; mso-char-type: symbol; mso-hansi-font-family: "Gill Sans MT"; mso-symbol-font-family: Wingdings;">à</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";"> everyone can be charitable. Can turn lust,
greed and pride into charity<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">What matters in your act is your intention—true charity, which
earns salvation, requires true intention<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">Merchants satisfying self=sin satisfying
others=charity influenced by Luke’s gospel<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">Adaptations of the Augustinian
Condition (AC)<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">From C12 onwards—appropriations of the AC as ethics and mode of
government<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">2 profane appropriations:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst" style="line-height: 115%; margin-left: 54.0pt; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l20 level1 lfo17; text-indent: -18.0pt;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Gill Sans MT"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">1.<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 7pt; line-height: normal;"> </span></span><!--[endif]--><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">Development of Charity<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpLast" style="line-height: 115%; margin-left: 54.0pt; mso-add-space: auto;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">Aristocratic
ethics<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin-left: 54.0pt;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">Largesse of lords is reciprocated
by loyalty, creating a virtuous circle. Lord give fief</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Wingdings; mso-ascii-font-family: "Gill Sans MT"; mso-char-type: symbol; mso-hansi-font-family: "Gill Sans MT"; mso-symbol-font-family: Wingdings;">à</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">loyalty. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin-left: 54.0pt;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">A profane treatment of pride<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin-left: 54.0pt;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">NOT an exchange<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst" style="line-height: 115%; margin-left: 54.0pt; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l20 level1 lfo17; text-indent: -18.0pt;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Gill Sans MT"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">2.<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 7pt; line-height: normal;"> </span></span><!--[endif]--><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">Development of lust
(Christianizing nobility)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 115%; margin-left: 54.0pt; mso-add-space: auto;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">Courtly
love<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpLast" style="line-height: 115%; margin-left: 54.0pt; mso-add-space: auto;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">Noble man
wants a lady’s mercy/ gift<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">Not greed (?) usury is not charity but its opposite antidora
(?)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<b><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">The Liberal
Condition (LC)<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">Full bloom market Km (Capitalism) doesn’t arrive until early
C20<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">Development of LC—mostly associated with Scottish Enlightenment
of C18-David Hume and Adam Smith<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">Rehabilitation of INTEREST as a
form of greed<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">2 canonical books addressing this topic:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst" style="line-height: 115%; margin-left: 54.0pt; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l21 level1 lfo18; text-indent: -18.0pt;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Symbol; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;">·<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 7pt; line-height: normal;">
</span></span><!--[endif]--><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">Weber’s
<i>The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of
Capitalism</i><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 115%; margin-left: 54.0pt; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l21 level1 lfo18; text-indent: -18.0pt;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Symbol; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;">·<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 7pt; line-height: normal;">
</span></span><!--[endif]--><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">Albert
Hirschman’s <i>The Passions and the Interest</i><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpLast" style="line-height: 115%; margin-left: 54.0pt; mso-add-space: auto;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">Interest (avarice) rehabilitated by theorists/ proponent of
Reason of State (Hirschman and Foucault)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">Post-Machiavellian advisors to absolutist monarchs<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">Reason of State<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">C17=time when states accept they are here to stay/ sustainable
and in competition with other states<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">Governmentality moves out of pastoral domain and becomes a way
of reinforcing the state which needs to be strong by mobilizing its population</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Wingdings; mso-ascii-font-family: "Gill Sans MT"; mso-char-type: symbol; mso-hansi-font-family: "Gill Sans MT"; mso-symbol-font-family: Wingdings;">à</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";"> <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">secular governmentality<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraph" style="line-height: 115%; margin-left: 72.0pt; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l15 level1 lfo19; text-indent: -18.0pt;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Symbol; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;">·<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 7pt; line-height: normal;">
</span></span><!--[endif]--><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">People
to become more disciplined, work harder, commit to prosperity of the state,
maximise their docility and utility<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Wingdings; mso-ascii-font-family: "Gill Sans MT"; mso-char-type: symbol; mso-hansi-font-family: "Gill Sans MT"; mso-symbol-font-family: Wingdings;">à</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";"> Problem, because people still dominated by
their cupidity—passsions—desires which are volient and inconstant<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">Reason of State advisors: people have passions and interests<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">Interests are passions informed by reason—thinking about how to
get what you want abd thinking about the risk and the relationship between
rick/ rewards—costs/ benefits<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">State needs to stimulate and cultivate these interests to make
population more productive and controllable because interests are calculated
and calculations can be strimulated and reproduced </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Wingdings; mso-ascii-font-family: "Gill Sans MT"; mso-char-type: symbol; mso-hansi-font-family: "Gill Sans MT"; mso-symbol-font-family: Wingdings;">à</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";"> <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">Absolutist monarchs’ mercantilist/ protectionist policies in
C17. Develops manufacturing and wealth and glory of the state.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">Liberals</span></i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">—intervene in this in name of the merchant middle class—Scottish
Enlightenment. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst" style="line-height: 115%; mso-list: l15 level1 lfo19; text-indent: -18.0pt;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Symbol; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;">·<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 7pt; line-height: normal;">
</span></span><!--[endif]--><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">They
accept the representation of the human condition (subect of passions and
interests) BUT<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 115%; mso-list: l15 level1 lfo19; text-indent: -18.0pt;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Symbol; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;">·<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 7pt; line-height: normal;">
</span></span><!--[endif]--><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">Argue
that because of these elements to the HC the state should leave us alone
(Fouc’s we are governed too much)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 115%; mso-list: l15 level1 lfo19; text-indent: -18.0pt;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Symbol; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;">·<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 7pt; line-height: normal;">
</span></span><!--[endif]--><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">Because
these intereste are rational and productive, YOU should not govern us too much.
<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 115%; mso-list: l15 level1 lfo19; text-indent: -18.0pt;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Symbol; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;">·<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 7pt; line-height: normal;">
</span></span><!--[endif]--><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">Liberal
appropriation of subject of interests is turned against absolutist state/govt.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpLast" style="line-height: 115%; mso-list: l15 level1 lfo19; text-indent: -18.0pt;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Symbol; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;">·<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 7pt; line-height: normal;">
</span></span><!--[endif]--><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">Give
us what we need to pursue our interests, then leave us alone</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Wingdings; mso-ascii-font-family: "Gill Sans MT"; mso-char-type: symbol; mso-hansi-font-family: "Gill Sans MT"; mso-symbol-font-family: Wingdings;">à</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">develop interests of nation +
state<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">Moral Anthropologies—Hume and
Smith<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst" style="line-height: 115%; margin-left: 18.0pt; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l23 level1 lfo20; text-indent: -18.0pt;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Gill Sans MT"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">1.<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 7pt; line-height: normal;"> </span></span><!--[endif]--><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">David Hume <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 115%; mso-list: l4 level1 lfo21; text-indent: -18.0pt;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Symbol; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;">·<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 7pt; line-height: normal;">
</span></span><!--[endif]--><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">We
are motivated by our passions/ desires<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 115%; mso-list: l4 level1 lfo21; text-indent: -18.0pt;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Symbol; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;">·<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 7pt; line-height: normal;">
</span></span><!--[endif]--><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">Basic
orientation is to max. pleasure/ min. pain<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 115%; mso-list: l4 level1 lfo21; text-indent: -18.0pt;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Symbol; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;">·<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 7pt; line-height: normal;">
</span></span><!--[endif]--><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">Anti-Augustinian—not
a sin<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 115%; mso-list: l4 level1 lfo21; text-indent: -18.0pt;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Symbol; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;">·<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 7pt; line-height: normal;">
</span></span><!--[endif]--><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">We
also have instrumental reason</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Wingdings; mso-ascii-font-family: "Gill Sans MT"; mso-char-type: symbol; mso-hansi-font-family: "Gill Sans MT"; mso-symbol-font-family: Wingdings;">à</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">think on best way to satisfy passion/
desires<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 115%; mso-list: l4 level1 lfo21; text-indent: -18.0pt;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Symbol; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;">·<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 7pt; line-height: normal;">
</span></span><!--[endif]--><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">Interest
= passion informed by reason<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 115%; mso-list: l4 level1 lfo21; text-indent: -18.0pt;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Symbol; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;">·<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 7pt; line-height: normal;">
</span></span><!--[endif]--><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">Society?
Comes from sexual attraction</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Wingdings; mso-ascii-font-family: "Gill Sans MT"; mso-char-type: symbol; mso-hansi-font-family: "Gill Sans MT"; mso-symbol-font-family: Wingdings;">à</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";"> pleasure, which creates benevolence between
lovers and within familie/ kin and small local groups—extended families<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 115%; mso-list: l4 level1 lfo21; text-indent: -18.0pt;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Symbol; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;">·<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 7pt; line-height: normal;">
</span></span><!--[endif]--><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">Sex
makes for benevolent kin groups but these are too atomistic as basis for
Society which requires the development of interests</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Wingdings; mso-ascii-font-family: "Gill Sans MT"; mso-char-type: symbol; mso-hansi-font-family: "Gill Sans MT"; mso-symbol-font-family: Wingdings;">à</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";"> systems of exchange and forms of
justice—3 rules:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 115%; margin-left: 216.0pt; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l26 level1 lfo22; mso-text-indent-alt: -18.0pt; text-indent: -216.0pt;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Gill Sans MT"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Gill Sans MT";"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 7pt; line-height: normal;">
</span>i.<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 7pt; line-height: normal;">
</span></span><!--[endif]--><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">Right
to private propertyu (protected)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 115%; margin-left: 216.0pt; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l26 level1 lfo22; mso-text-indent-alt: -18.0pt; text-indent: -216.0pt;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Gill Sans MT"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Gill Sans MT";"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 7pt; line-height: normal;">
</span>ii.<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 7pt; line-height: normal;">
</span></span><!--[endif]--><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">Right
to alienate/ sell what is yours<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 115%; margin-left: 216.0pt; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l26 level1 lfo22; mso-text-indent-alt: -18.0pt; text-indent: -216.0pt;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Gill Sans MT"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Gill Sans MT";"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 7pt; line-height: normal;">
</span>iii.<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 7pt; line-height: normal;">
</span></span><!--[endif]--><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">Obligation
to respect/ honour contracts<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 115%; mso-list: l16 level1 lfo23; text-indent: -18.0pt;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Symbol; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;">·<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 7pt; line-height: normal;">
</span></span><!--[endif]--><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">Society
is based on Justice—rule of law—alongside which runs a slow process of
optimizing interests.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 115%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 115%; margin-left: 18.0pt; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l23 level1 lfo20; text-indent: -18.0pt;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Gill Sans MT"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">2.<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 7pt; line-height: normal;"> </span></span><!--[endif]--><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">Adam Smith<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 115%; margin-left: 18.0pt; mso-add-space: auto;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">Takes
Hume a step further<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 115%; margin-left: 18.0pt; mso-add-space: auto;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">WON
(Wealth of Nations) + (TMS) Theory of Moral Sentiments are contradictory?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 115%; margin-left: 18.0pt; mso-add-space: auto;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">WON—we
are all driven by pursuit of interests, But<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 115%; margin-left: 18.0pt; mso-add-space: auto;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">TMS—we
are all driven by pursuit of sympathy<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 115%; margin-left: 18.0pt; mso-add-space: auto;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 115%; margin-left: 18.0pt; mso-add-space: auto;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">Not
a contradiction (or rather, the contradiction is ‘resolved’ in a specific way: via
modes of government) because<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 115%; margin-left: 18.0pt; mso-add-space: auto;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">The
source of pursuit of interests to improve conditions comes from SON (State of
Nature)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 115%; margin-left: 18.0pt; mso-add-space: auto;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">SON
is a primitive state ruled by scarcity—survival is hard and atomistic<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 115%; margin-left: 18.0pt; mso-add-space: auto;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">Best
way to improve conditions is by multiplying exchanges, but this is not known in
SON, rather there is a dormant propensity to exchange </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Wingdings; mso-ascii-font-family: "Gill Sans MT"; mso-char-type: symbol; mso-hansi-font-family: "Gill Sans MT"; mso-symbol-font-family: Wingdings;">à</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";"> commerce</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Wingdings; mso-ascii-font-family: "Gill Sans MT"; mso-char-type: symbol; mso-hansi-font-family: "Gill Sans MT"; mso-symbol-font-family: Wingdings;">à</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">interest is best served by
exchanging, in turn </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Wingdings; mso-ascii-font-family: "Gill Sans MT"; mso-char-type: symbol; mso-hansi-font-family: "Gill Sans MT"; mso-symbol-font-family: Wingdings;">à</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";"> division of labour, increased productivity
and specialization<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 115%; margin-left: 18.0pt; mso-add-space: auto;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 115%; margin-left: 18.0pt; mso-add-space: auto;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">Development
of market economy<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 115%; margin-left: 18.0pt; mso-add-space: auto;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">All
pursuing self-interest—guided by invisible hand</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Wingdings; mso-ascii-font-family: "Gill Sans MT"; mso-char-type: symbol; mso-hansi-font-family: "Gill Sans MT"; mso-symbol-font-family: Wingdings;">à</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">create max. prosperity for all +
evenly distributed . . .but Smith asks why is this taking so long? Because
there is a residual/ remnant propensity from SON to hoard<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 115%; margin-left: 18.0pt; mso-add-space: auto;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 115%; margin-left: 18.0pt; mso-add-space: auto;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">The
more we exchange the more we live in society</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Wingdings; mso-ascii-font-family: "Gill Sans MT"; mso-char-type: symbol; mso-hansi-font-family: "Gill Sans MT"; mso-symbol-font-family: Wingdings;">à</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";"> Sympathy—a new yearning. At best
we have ability to simulate the thoughts/feelings of others so that we can
increase access to self via gaze of others. Wanting to know whether or not you
are liked is beginning of morality<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 115%; margin-left: 18.0pt; mso-add-space: auto;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 115%; margin-left: 18.0pt; mso-add-space: auto;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">Some
want to be praised-to be liked but
it is better to be likable/ praiseworthy</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Wingdings; mso-ascii-font-family: "Gill Sans MT"; mso-char-type: symbol; mso-hansi-font-family: "Gill Sans MT"; mso-symbol-font-family: Wingdings;">à</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">Q how do you choose the right
person to ask if you are praiseworthy?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 115%; margin-left: 18.0pt; mso-add-space: auto;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpLast" style="line-height: 115%; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo24; text-indent: -18.0pt;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Gill Sans MT"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">1.<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 7pt; line-height: normal;"> </span></span><!--[endif]--><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">these are the people you find
praiseworthy. You then, abstract the best qualities from these people into an
impartial spectator in your mind (super ego?) who monitors own conduct cf
panopticon<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">Only by engaging in exchanges with others do you begin to build
up a bank of praiseworthy experiences<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">These are not commercial exchanges–but exchanges of
information—giving receiving judgment</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Wingdings; mso-ascii-font-family: "Gill Sans MT"; mso-char-type: symbol; mso-hansi-font-family: "Gill Sans MT"; mso-symbol-font-family: Wingdings;">à</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">development of a disinterested exchange<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">Liberal Condition<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">2 propensities<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst" style="line-height: 115%; mso-list: l16 level1 lfo23; text-indent: -18.0pt;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Symbol; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;">·<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 7pt; line-height: normal;">
</span></span><!--[endif]--><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">Interest—commercial<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpLast" style="line-height: 115%; mso-list: l16 level1 lfo23; text-indent: -18.0pt;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Symbol; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;">·<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 7pt; line-height: normal;">
</span></span><!--[endif]--><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">Disinterested
praiseworthiness (cf aesthetics of Kant, M. Arnold)—be recognized as likable
and praiseworthy<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">How to combine the 2?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">Smith—one of the best ways to be recognized as praiseworthy is
to get rich<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";"> But, have to mindful of others who envy you,
and watch for the poor who might band together. Smith also has some doubts . .
.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">Smith applies Hume’s 2 spheres: private/benevolent --
Public/justice<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">Victorian Liberal Condition<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">Men pursue interests in the public sphere where they seek
praise and the invisible hand of the market rules<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">In the private sphere, the realm of disinterested exchanges,
the invisible hand of the difference of the sexes rules . . .<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">Women’s nature is ruled by 2 qualities: modesty and maternal/
motherly love<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">While some desires can be turned into interest, sex cannot as
men are brutes<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">Women are naturally modest and will resist attacks on their
virtue</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Wingdings; mso-ascii-font-family: "Gill Sans MT"; mso-char-type: symbol; mso-hansi-font-family: "Gill Sans MT"; mso-symbol-font-family: Wingdings;">à</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">men
admire women who keep their virtue entact<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">Men are looking for someone who is worthy of calling him praiseworthy—an
admirable person/ impartial spectator</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Wingdings; mso-ascii-font-family: "Gill Sans MT"; mso-char-type: symbol; mso-hansi-font-family: "Gill Sans MT"; mso-symbol-font-family: Wingdings;">à</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">he offers marriage to this person. Once
married her modesty is replaced by motherly love.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">The man respects his wife and makes $ in the public sphere
which he brings into the household.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">Public sphere dominated by men and a private sphere dominated
by morality. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">This sketch of the Victorian Liberal Condition (VLC) can be
seen Richardson’s <i>Pamela</i>. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">Thus VLC= 2 invisible hands:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst" style="line-height: 115%; mso-list: l2 level1 lfo25; text-indent: -18.0pt;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Gill Sans MT"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">1.<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 7pt; line-height: normal;"> </span></span><!--[endif]--><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">Realm of interest=market that
allows and enable self-interested people to produce collective prosperity—interested
commercial exchanges<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpLast" style="line-height: 115%; mso-list: l2 level1 lfo25; text-indent: -18.0pt;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Gill Sans MT"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">2.<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 7pt; line-height: normal;"> </span></span><!--[endif]--><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">Realm of disinterest=domestic sphere,
based on maternal love—disinterested, domestic-intimate exchanges<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">Good liberal government</span></i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";"> is not anarchic, but
responsible:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst" style="line-height: 115%; mso-list: l7 level1 lfo26; text-indent: -18.0pt;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Gill Sans MT"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">1.<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 7pt; line-height: normal;"> </span></span><!--[endif]--><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">Sustains markets—private property/
freedom of exchange/up holds conracts<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpLast" style="line-height: 115%; mso-list: l7 level1 lfo26; text-indent: -18.0pt;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Gill Sans MT"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">2.<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 7pt; line-height: normal;"> </span></span><!--[endif]--><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">Ensures families prosper—encourages
women to be modest + maternal + incites men to respect modesty<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">Liberal Government</span></i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">Exchanges in both spheres: <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst" style="line-height: 115%; mso-list: l5 level1 lfo27; text-indent: -18.0pt;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Symbol; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;">·<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 7pt; line-height: normal;">
</span></span><!--[endif]--><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">governs
taxpayers—maximizes their interests<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpLast" style="line-height: 115%; mso-list: l5 level1 lfo27; text-indent: -18.0pt;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Symbol; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;">·<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 7pt; line-height: normal;">
</span></span><!--[endif]--><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">fosters
disinterested relationship between Nation + mother-children of the nation—gives
national identity and children given life for war<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">Different appropriations of the liberal condition:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">Non-liberal<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">Romantic<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">Socialist<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">Feminist<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";">Evolution and crisis of liberal condition </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Wingdings; mso-ascii-font-family: "Gill Sans MT"; mso-char-type: symbol; mso-hansi-font-family: "Gill Sans MT"; mso-symbol-font-family: Wingdings;">à</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Gill Sans MT";"> rise of Neoliberalism.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<!--EndFragment-->Michael Chttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03997773018535384710noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8244167267206207060.post-63450967002484359132014-03-11T21:36:00.002+11:002014-03-13T06:43:13.568+11:00Challenging neoliberalism from within?<br />
Excerpts from Michel Feher, 'Self-Appreciation; or, The Aspirations of Human Capital,' <i>Public Culture </i>21:1, 2009. 21-41.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-size: 10pt;">To envision human capital as a subjective form or formation implies that it </span><span style="font-size: 10pt;">must be compared to the figure of the free laborer, rather than to the notion of
labor power. In other words, my claim is that the widespread use of the concept of
human capital is less a symptom of the gradual “commodification” of the liberal
subject than it is the expression of an emergent neoliberal condition, the novelty of
which has been so far underestimated.</span><span style="font-size: 7pt; vertical-align: 2pt;"> </span><span style="font-size: 10pt;">But as I shall also argue, critics of neolib-
eralism should not simply analyze and criticize the notion of human capital as the
successor to the notion of the free laborer: instead, they ought to adopt the notion
of human capital, or, to put it more bluntly, they ought to embrace the neoliberal
condition, much as the workers’ movement adopted the figure of the free worker,
and allow it to express aspirations and demands that its neoliberal promoters had
neither intended nor foreseen. (25)</span></blockquote>
<div class="page" title="Page 7">
<div class="layoutArea">
<div class="column">
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-size: 10pt;">[A]n investor in his or her human capital is concerned less with maxi-
mizing the returns on his or her investments—whether monetary or psychic—
than with appreciating, that is, increasing the stock value of, the capital to which
he or she is identified. In other words, insofar as our condition is that of human
capital in a neoliberal environment, our main purpose is not so much to profit from
our accumulated potential as to constantly value or appreciate ourselves — or at
least prevent our own depreciation.<br />
</span><span style="font-size: 10pt;">Such a change of purpose is ultimately what distinguishes the neoliberal condition from its liberal predecessor: while the utilitarian subjects still postulated by
Becker and other rational choice theorists seek to maximize their satisfaction, and
thus make their decisions accordingly, their neoliberal counterparts are primarily
concerned with the impact of their conducts, and thus of the satisfaction they may
draw from them, on the level of their self-appreciation or self-esteem.</span> <span style="font-size: x-small;">(27) </span></blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-size: 10pt;">In short, all one knows of human capital is the following: (1) the subjects that
it defines seek to appreciate and to value themselves, such that their life may be
thought of as a strategy aimed at self-appreciation; (2) all of their behaviors and
all the events affecting them (in any existential register) are liable to cause the
subjects either to appreciate or to depreciate themselves; and (3) it is therefore
possible to govern subjects seeking to increase the value of their human capital,
or, more precisely, to act on the way they govern themselves, by inciting them to
adopt conducts deemed valorizing and to follow models for self-valuation that
modify their priorities and inflect their strategic choices. (28)</span> </blockquote>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-size: 10pt;">While neoliberal and radical critiques were both instrumental in breaking
down the constitutive oppositions of the liberal condition—production versus
reproduction, domestic versus public, personal versus political, and so on—in
the past three decades, only the former has imposed its definition of what self-
appreciation entails: for its part, the latter has been largely repudiated both by a
“modern” Left in desperate search of an appealing light version of neoliberal-
ism and by an “authentic” Left patiently waiting for its putative constituents to
wake up and understand where their real interests are. By contrast, challenging
the neoliberal condition from within, that is, embracing the idea that we are all
investors in our human capital, in order to contest the alleged conditions under
which we appreciate ourselves, would amount to rejoining the radical sensibility
of the 1960s and 1970s. Instead of denouncing and lamenting the personalization
of politics as the strategy through which neoliberalism causes people to lose sight of
their collective interests, playing the human capital card could thus be a way of
relaunching the politicization of the personal. (38)</span></blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-size: 10pt;">In terms of discursive strategy, neoliberalism can boast two major successes:
its promoters have made it legitimate to want to care for oneself while presenting
themselves as the champions of personal responsibility (insofar as their policies
identify self-appreciation with self-reliance). Their leftist opponents, by contrast,
are accused of making people feel unduly guilty (by implying that the desire to
value oneself is mere egoism) and, at the same time, of fostering complacency
and irresponsibility (by allowing people to rely on social benefits rather than on
personal effort and by making self-appreciating citizens pay for those who have
squandered their human capital). Thus it may be that for the Left, challenging
neoliberal modes of self-appreciation, rather than rejecting the framework of the
neoliberal condition, is not only a sound tactical move. More decisively, it may
also be a way of warding off its current melancholy by means of reentering the
domain of the enviable and desirable — of raising, from its own perspective, the
question of what constitutes an appreciable life. (41)</span> </blockquote>
Access Feher's essay <a href="https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&pid=sites&srcid=ZGVmYXVsdGRvbWFpbnxwb2xpdGljYWxjdXJyZW5jeW9mYXJ0fGd4OjE3ODAyYTYwY2MwOGIzNDg">here</a><br />
<br />
And first 2 Goldsmith lectures from series of 6 by Michel Feher expanding the themes captured in the excerpts above, <a href="http://www.gold.ac.uk/podcasts/app/front/podcastsBySeries/45">here.</a><br />
<br />
<a href="http://vimeo.com/80882516">Vimeo</a> of first lecture 'The Neoliberal Condition and its predecessors: Redemption, Fulfilment, Appreciation.'<br />
<br />
<br />Michael Chttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03997773018535384710noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8244167267206207060.post-64014468541235991842012-08-11T21:46:00.000+10:002012-08-12T11:20:15.917+10:00Softened milk arrowroots with Grandma<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"></span><br />
<div>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"><b>Dr Worreddy and Grandma</b></span></span></div>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">
One of the motivations for moving to southern Tasmania in 2004 was to be closer to <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruny_Island">Bruny Island</a>. Colin Johnson's (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mudrooroo">Mudrooroo</a>'s) 1983 novel, <i><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctor_Wooreddy's_Prescription_for_Enduring_the_Ending_of_the_World">Doctor Worreddy's Prescription for Enduring the Ending of the World</a></i>, set largely on Bruny Island, seemed to have exerted a magnetic pull on me, providing an imagined history that I felt I could connect with. </span><br />
<div>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">This pull, towards the Bruny Island of this historical fiction, I now realise, was due to unresolved questions in that part of my heritage occupied by my paternal grandmother. While my paternal grandfather was born in the South West of England, eventually migrating to New South Wales just prior to WWII, my maternal grandmother descended from English convicts, and her de facto husband and father of my mother held a </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">Scottish heritage, occupying a</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"> spectral presence in my life due to his disappearance as he succumbed to alcoholism after service in WWII, Grandma's heritage was and is hazy.</span></div>
<div>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">She was adopted and hailed from somewhere near <a href="https://maps.google.com.au/maps?hl=en&client=safari&q=Grenfell&ie=UTF-8&hq=&hnear=0x6b1a0da860426609:0x40609b49043e990,Grenfell+NSW&gl=au&ei=byomUKvRM-aaiQfWl4DQCA&ved=0CKABELYD">Grenfell</a>, in western New South Wales, moving to Narraweena, opposite a Church of England, on the northern beaches of Sydney's north shore after WWII where my father, uncle and aunty were raised. When Dad and Mum raised us three kids we lived 5 minutes away from Grandma and Grandfather and, working hard to start their new family, my parents would entrust me to Grandma and I remember spending days with her as a young boy. While she was </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">needy, troubled and bitter, I was still </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">being spoilt, as the first grandchild often is, feeling warm and doted on. </span></div>
<div>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">Then, Dad and Grandma had a falling out--they'd had a tense relationship, full of contests and struggles--when I was about 7 and that was the end of that. No more milk arrowroots dipped in milky, sugary tea. No more Sunday School. </span></div>
<div>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">As kids we tend to experience time as an opening out, wide and expansive. Summers feel like years, days can last for a season. But in my memory Grandma died not long after this falling out. Maybe it was a couple of years later. I'm not sure. </span></div>
<div>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">We never spoke of her again. It seemed like a relief that she had passed away--she was never satisfied with her children's achievements, and was disappointed with life. Nothing was good enough . . .</span></div>
<div>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"> *</span></div>
<div>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"><b>A shameful heritage?</b></span></div>
<div>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">Talk that Grandma was probably adopted because she had an aboriginal mother was slow to emerge in my extended family. A cousin begun to tick the Aboriginal box on forms from which her children stood to gain some advantage, and my Aunty and her kids and even my brother's features and darker skin colour started to register as noticeably aboriginal. Searches for <i>proof</i> failed to locate definitive evidence. We'd left it too long; anyone who might have known what led to her adoption was dead. Maybe there are diaries or journals that provide some confirmation of what we believe. As far as we know she wasn't part of the 'stolen generation': something less institutional had probably occurred, and a moral and shameful problem had been dealt with in a benevolent fashion at a private and confidential level. The problem solved by adoption.</span></div>
<div>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">Maybe her bitterness was in discovering her adoption. And where did all that shame go? Did she carry it into her life? Did it inform her affective world in such a profound way that there would never be any relief from its atmospheric pressure; no overcoming a <i>social</i> and <i>historical</i> structure of feeling through protestant denial and the drive to work-based social ascension for your children. </span></div>
<div>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">What was the intergenerational heritage of these structures of shameful feeling? What cultural forms arose and were deployed to try and personally assuage and overcome historical shame? </span></div>
<div>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"> *</span></div>
<div>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"><b>3 criteria</b></span></div>
<div>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">Questions of Aboriginal identity and heritage remain <a href="http://www.theglobalmail.org/feature/no-andrew-bolt-did-not-have-a-point/332/#">highly contested</a> in contemporary Australia. Certain jobs, university and school places and scholarships are earmarked for Aboriginal applicants. Applying for these places or funds necessitates confirmation of identity, which can be sought by satisfying three criteria: proof of descent, self-identification and recognition by the local Aboriginal community organisation. In some cases, this third step is not a requirement. </span></div>
<div>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"><b>Identity</b></span></div>
<div>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">For some Aboriginals, claims to membership by those with white skin is illegitimate: how can you be Aboriginal if you haven't grown up with the experience of being marked as Aboriginal? There is an assumption here, which is that the fairer skinned person <i>hasn't</i> been identified as Aboriginal. Someone raised in an identified Aboriginal family will be marked as Aboriginal, and may also have been inducted into the Aboriginal cultural, social, political, legal and religious systems and practices of their country and people. </span></div>
<div>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">Clearly, I can't claim Aboriginal identity. How could I? </span></div>
<div>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"><b>Need</b></span></div>
<div>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">To be Aboriginal in Australia is, for some people, to be in a state of crisis; in dire need. To be fair-skinned, metropolitan, and university educated is utterly incompatible with being Aboriginal because real Aboriginals require support and those who are dark-skinned, regional and poorly educated should not have to suffer while the relatively privileged receive the advantages and benefits intended for those in need. This is a powerful argument; one that can be turned towards an attack on fair-skinned Aborginals and thereby on any Aboriginals who are not deemed to be in need. </span></div>
<div>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">Commentators like <a href="http://www.theglobalmail.org/feature/so-did-andrew-bolt-have-a-point/273/">Andrew Bolt </a>have exemplified this sort of attack, effectively arguing that skin-colour equates with privilege (either its lack or surplus), ignoring the degree to which an individual's life experiences cannot necessarily be read off their skin colour. The goal of attacks like Bolt, it seems to me, is to de-historicise the complex affects of colonisation, re-inscribing the meaning of Aboriginality onto the dark skin of Aboriginals now. Here the Aboriginal is pre-modern, in need of <i>intervention</i>, close to extinction. </span></div>
<div>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"><b>Heritage</b></span></div>
<div>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">For some people, ticking the box for Aboriginal identification on a form, is less about their painful experiences of being interpellated or recognised as Aboriginal, and less about a neo-liberal bid to exploit that section of their portfolio of human capital lying like old blue chip stocks in their genetic heritage, than it is about a question or pressure in their sense of heritage. There is no profound unsettling of identity or dire need. </span></div>
<div>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">That part of my heritage occupied by my Grandma lies off the map. There is no actual <i>country</i> she came from, only ones that are imagined, like Dr Worreddy's on Bruny Island. This is not to say there is no heritage or legacy: an atmosphere of personally lived historical shame and learning how to time the dunking of milk arrowroot biscuits without oversoftening them.</span></div>
<div>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">PS These thoughts partly inspired by SBS TV's <i>Insight </i>program from this week: <a href="http://www.sbs.com.au/ondemand/program/131/Insight">Aboriginal or Not</a>. </span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>Michael Chttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03997773018535384710noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8244167267206207060.post-79239636170385370042012-08-08T07:23:00.003+10:002012-08-08T07:32:31.157+10:00Historical presents: gearings and momentumAt work yesterday x was telling me about a workshop on flourishing she attended. X drew a pie chart, divided into 3 sections: 40, 50 & 10%. 'One slice is for genetic factors, another is your own efforts and the other is for situation and environmental influences. What percentage influence does each have on happiness and flourishing?' I asked about the validity of the science she claimed was behind this diagram and asked 'Where's the slice for history?' 'The science is there and history is the same as sociology which is covered under the situation area.'<br />
<br />
I went for 40% genetic, 50% situation and 10% will.<br />
<br />
Wrong! Will is 50, genes are 10 and situational factors are 40%.<br />
<br />
The phone then rang and the chat ended but I was left wondering how do you explain what you mean by the pressure of history on the present?<br />
<br />
The historical present is a central focus of Lauren Berlant's <i>Cruel Optimism</i> which positions itself against the types of postive psychology or science of flourishing that seem to me so easily play into neoliberal governmentalities of optimistic self-enterprising. But the historical present: how to grasp the idea of it? Gears perhaps?<br />
<br />
Gears of varying weights and locations, speeds and interconnections that can turn as slowly as Pluto's revolution around the sun, or as fast as an orbiting electron. Gears all turning, some slowing, some newly envigorated, some as local as your own bloodstream's rhythms and some as distant as the invention of the alphabet.<br />
<br />
The historical present is a meshwork of gearings, driving a mess of phenomena. Some gears carry such weight that although they are no longer impelled, the cultural and material affects of their turning still resounds. Slowly moving towards stasis, gears like the vinyl record run only on momentum. Other gears are emergent, shrouded in the public imaginary through the lens of moral panics or the death of civic discourse, like web based social media.<br />
<br />
The structures of feeling that are historically present are like this meshwork of gears that require something like a rhythmanalysis to grasp. The historical present weighs like pressure systems on situations and conscious intentional will.Michael Chttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03997773018535384710noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8244167267206207060.post-48605240098166357172012-08-05T14:54:00.001+10:002012-08-05T15:04:03.114+10:00For new structures of rhythmic feeling<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">Instead of the vision of the everyday <i>organised</i> by capitalism that we find in Lefebvre and de Certeau, among others, I am interested in the overwhelming ordinary that is <i>disorganised</i> by it, and by many other forces besides. This is a matter of a different emphasis, not of a theoretical negation: the rhythms of ordinary existence in the present--Lefebvres's <i><a href="http://books.google.com.au/books?id=INcAsZ1oTq8C&q=dresage#v=onepage&q=dressage&f=false">dressage</a></i> as a model for subjectivity in general--scramble the distinction between forced adaptation, pleasurable variation, and threatening dissolution of of life-confirming norms. This ordinary is an intersecting space where many forces and histories circulate and become "ready to hand" in the ordinary, as Stanley Cavell would put it, for inventing new rhythms for living, rhythms that could, at any time, congeal into new norms, forms, and institutions.</span></blockquote>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"><br /></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"><a href="http://supervalentthought.com/">Lauren Berlant</a> <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Cruel-Optimism-Lauren-Berlant/dp/0822351110">Cruel Optimism</a> </i>Location 128/4461</span>Michael Chttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03997773018535384710noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8244167267206207060.post-74796460903515150832012-05-22T05:49:00.000+10:002012-05-22T05:49:55.292+10:00Human Capital: abilities machines producing income streamsA great passage from Jodi Dean's essay <br />
<br />
<br />
<!--StartFragment--> <br />
<blockquote>Neoliberalism is [. . .] a governmentality wherein economic reason confronts, judges, and displaces governmental reason. Foucault’s primary examples are Germany and the United States. In each instance neoliberalism arises out of a critique of excessive governance (2008: 322), as a response to a mode of government that is erring on the side of too much and hence endangering freedom. The interesting twist is that where one would expect such a critique to urge the state to take its hands off the economy, it does something else instead: it subjects the state to the economy. German and American neoliberals reverse the equation, making the economy the legitimator of the state. ‘In other words: a state under the supervision of the market rather than a market supervised by the state’ (2008: 116).</blockquote><blockquote>This reversal intensifies and extends biopolitical processes and mechanisms. Insofar as neoliberalism emphasizes the market as a site of competition rather than exchange, it demands that the state combat anti- com-petitive mechanisms and work to spread opportunities for competi- tion. Consequently, the state must be ever vigilant in these efforts as well as vigilant about its own efficiency in so doing. Such vigilance, moreover, is exercised not just with regard to government, as its operations and resources are privatized. Rather, neoliberalism entails a governmentality of ‘active, multiple, vigilant, and omnipresent’ intervention in society (2008:160). Society, too, must be opened up and subjected to the dynamic of competition. For neoliberals, this takes the form of the enterprise society, a vital, differentiated society of productive entrepreneurs, that is, individuals who take responsibility for their own success and well-being (hence, Foucault emphasizes their role as producers rather than consumers).</blockquote><blockquote>American neoliberalism was particularly effective in extending biopolitics via its theory of human capital. Human capital was the concept through which neoliberals grasped labor in its specificity, the way they sought to understand the meaning of labor means for the working person, the ra- tionality underlying the worker’s choices. Treating income as a return on capital, neoliberals construed the worker’s income in terms of the capital he has in himself. Because of the multiplicity of factors influencing workers’ choices – mobility, quality of life, familiarity, capacities to adapt, aver- sion to risk – the theory of human capital enabled economic analysis to permeate a variety of new domains, domains previously the purview of the human sciences that developed around disciplinary institutions (soci- ology, psychology, demography, criminology, etc).</blockquote><blockquote>Foucault explains that there are two primary kinds of human capital, innate and acquired. Innate elements are heritable, genetic. A person concerned with her child’s innate human capital can take the proper steps toward finding an appropriate co-producer of this child. She can seek to secure a mate with desirable traits that might reduce her off-springs’ risks and enhance their competitive position. Genetic research is thus valuable to individuals in an enterprise society as it provides a knowledge they can use to plan for the future. At the same time, it gives rise to a complex of issues of screening, disclosure, prevention, and risk. Acquired capital refers to the skills and capacities that prepare individuals for competition. Health care, both infant and maternal, is important here, as are matters of health and hygiene, diet and exercise, relationships and opportunities. In this regard, the theory of human capital stimulates interventions in family life as it asks about the best ways to produce economic competitors. Neoliberalism’s emphasis on education as preparation for work similarly targets the worker as an ‘abilities machine.’ Rather than producing critical humanists or responsible citizens, the theory of human capital treats education as a means for instilling in the worker those specific capacities that render him sufficiently competent, competitive, and flexible.</blockquote><blockquote>Under neoliberalism, then, power gets a hold of individuals to the extent that they are little enterprises, abilities machines competing in the market.</blockquote><!--EndFragment-->Michael Chttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03997773018535384710noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8244167267206207060.post-85278147777787094252011-08-07T11:26:00.000+10:002011-08-07T11:26:52.591+10:00Graeber's rhythmanalysis of the first 5,000 years of debtExcerpt from an essay version of David Graeber's timely <a href="http://theanarchistlibrary.org/HTML/David_Graeber__Debt__The_First_Five_Thousand_Years.html">Debt: The first Five Thousand Years</a>. Graeber here argues for an historical analysis of the present that works through a rhythmanalysis: attempting to layer the multiple rhythms of the present together (long durations, the medium and the micro rhythms as a contemporaneity) and feel them. "<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, 'DejaVu Sans', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">How do all these rhythms weave in and out of each other? Is there one core rhythm pushing the others along? How do they sit inside one another, syncopate, concatenate, harmonise, clash?"</span><br />
<br />
<br />
<div style="font-family: Verdana, 'DejaVu Sans', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">Historical action tends to be narrative in form. In order to be able to make an intervention in history (arguably, in order to act decisively in any circumstances), one has to be able to cast oneself in some sort of story — though, speaking as someone who has actually had the opportunity to be in the middle of one or two world historical events, I can also attest that one in that situation is almost never quite certain what sort of drama it really is, since there are usually several alternatives battling it out, and that the question is not entirely resolved until everything is over (and never completely resolved even then). But I think there’s something that comes before even that. When one is first trying to assess a historical situation, having no real idea where one stands, trying to place oneself in a much larger stream of history so as to be able to start to think about what the problem even is, then usually it’s less a matter of placing oneself in a story than of figuring out the larger rhythmic structure, the ebb and flow of historical movements. Is what is happening around me the result of a generational political realignment, a movement of capitalism’s boom or bust cycle, the beginning or result of a new wave of struggles, the inevitable unfolding of a Kondratieff B curve? Or is it all these things? How do all these rhythms weave in and out of each other? Is there one core rhythm pushing the others along? How do they sit inside one another, syncopate, concatenate, harmonise, clash?</div><div style="font-family: Verdana, 'DejaVu Sans', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">Let me briefly lay out what might be at stake here. I’ll focus here on cycles of capitalism, secondarily on war. This is because I don’t like capitalism and think that it’s rapidly destroying the planet, and that if we are going to survive as a species, we’re really going to have to come up with something else. I also don’t like war, both for all the obvious reasons, but also, because it strikes me as one of the main ways capitalism has managed to perpetuate itself. So in picking through possible theories of historical cycles, this is what I have had primarily in mind. Even here there are any number of possibilities. Here are a few:</div><div style="font-family: Verdana, 'DejaVu Sans', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">Are we seeing an alternation between periods of peace and massive global warfare? In the late 19th century, for example, war between major industrial powers seemed to be a thing of the past, and this was accompanied by vast growth of both trade, and revolutionary internationalism (of broadly anarchist inspiration). 1914 marked a kind of reaction, a shift to 70 years mainly concerned with fighting, or planning for, world wars. The moment the Cold War ended, the pattern of the 1890s seemed to be repeating itself, and the reaction was predictable.</div><div style="font-family: Verdana, 'DejaVu Sans', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">Or could one look at brief cycles — sub-cycles perhaps? This is particularly clear in the US, where one can see a continual alternation, since WWII, between periods of relative peace and democratic mobilisation immediately followed by a ratcheting up of international conflict: the civil rights movement followed by Vietnam, for example; the anti-nuclear movement of the ’70s followed by Reagan’s proxy wars and abandonment of détente; the global justice movement followed by the War on Terror.</div><div style="font-family: Verdana, 'DejaVu Sans', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">Or should we be looking at financialisation? Are we dealing with Fernand Braudel or Giovanni Arrighi’s alternation between hegemonic powers (Genoa/ Venice, Holland, England, USA), which start as centers for commercial and industrial capital, later turn into centers of finance capital, and then collapse?</div><div style="font-family: Verdana, 'DejaVu Sans', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">If so, then the question is of shifting hegemonies to East Asia, and whether (as Wallerstein for instance has recently been predicting) the US will gradually shift into the role of military enforcer for East Asian capital, provoking a realignment between Russia and the EU. Or, in fact, if all bets are off because the whole system is about to shift since, as Wallerstein also suggests, we are entering into an even more profound, 500-year cycle shift in the nature of the world-system itself?</div><div style="font-family: Verdana, 'DejaVu Sans', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">Are we dealing with a global movement, as some autonomists (for example, the Midnight Notes collective) propose, of waves of popular struggle, as capitalism reaches a point of saturation and collapse — a crisis of inclusion as it were?</div><div style="font-family: Verdana, 'DejaVu Sans', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">According to this version, the period from 1945 to perhaps 1975 was marked by a tacit deal with elements of the North Atlantic male working class, who were offered guaranteed good jobs and social security in exchange for political loyalty. The problem for capital was that more and more people demanded in on the deal: people in the Third World, excluded minorities in the North, and, finally, women. At this point the system broke, the oil shock and recession of the ’70s became a way of declaring that all deals were off: such groups could have political rights but these would no longer have any economic consequences.</div><div style="font-family: Verdana, 'DejaVu Sans', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">Then, the argument goes, a new cycle began in which workers tried — or were encouraged — to buy into capitalism itself, whether in the form of micro-credit, stock options, mortgage refinancing, or 401ks. It’s this movement that seems to have hit its limit now, since, contrary to much heady rhetoric, capitalism is not and can never be a democratic system that provides equal opportunities to everyone, and the moment there’s a serious attempt to include the bulk of the population even in one country (the US) into the deal, the whole thing collapses into energy crisis and global recession all over again.</div><div style="font-family: Verdana, 'DejaVu Sans', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">None of these are necessarily mutually exclusive but they have very different strategic implications. Much rests on which factor one happens to decide is the driving force: the internal dynamics of capitalism, the rise and fall of empires, the challenge of popular resistance? But when it comes to reading the rhythms in this way, the current moment still throws up unusual difficulties. There is a widespread sense that we are heading towards some kind of fundamental rupture, that old rhythms can no longer be counted on to repeat themselves, that we might be entering a new sort of time. Wallerstein says so much explicitly: if everything were going the way it generally has tended to go, for the last 500 years, East Asia would emerge as the new center of capitalist dominance. Problem is we may be coming to the end of a 500 year cycle and moving into a world that works on entirely different principles (subtext: capitalism itself may be coming to an end). In which case, who knows? Similarly, cycles of militarism cannot continue in the same form in a world where major military powers are capable of extinguishing all life on earth, with all-out war between them therefore impossible. Then there’s the factor of imminent ecological catastrophe.</div><div><br />
</div>Michael Chttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03997773018535384710noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8244167267206207060.post-55228789335335983252011-07-03T21:47:00.001+10:002011-07-03T22:05:41.931+10:00Literary History and its criticisms as mises en abyme<a href="http://themedusavstheodalisque.blogspot.com/2011/07/reply-from-dr-vernay.html">Reading from a distance: J.F Vernay's Panorama of Australian Literary History</a><br />
<br />
<a href="http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_7464/is_200705/ai_n32229350/?tag=content;col1">Vernay on Grunge fiction and the theme of sexual predation</a>Michael Chttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03997773018535384710noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8244167267206207060.post-84534364484029577422011-06-27T07:03:00.000+10:002011-06-27T07:03:46.582+10:00Haunted by Revolution: Whitlam's ghost and the public sphere of letters in Amanda Lohrey's The Reading Group<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhplGRHnReDC1PY4lu8kqrxKyaKvSUsQSf9UV02n-MTkeQiVCJoVlhBOCP-vQPQJBbh2smDI1ckHA9-SAnbUGrHAjkusMK9N4fodTQIz5vaDGwWyhm5NbJLL8oaye1EFT6OTKGVfsnLXyDy/s1600-h/180px-Goughandmark.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5175184402349924082" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhplGRHnReDC1PY4lu8kqrxKyaKvSUsQSf9UV02n-MTkeQiVCJoVlhBOCP-vQPQJBbh2smDI1ckHA9-SAnbUGrHAjkusMK9N4fodTQIz5vaDGwWyhm5NbJLL8oaye1EFT6OTKGVfsnLXyDy/s400/180px-Goughandmark.jpg" style="cursor: hand; cursor: pointer; float: right; margin: 0 0 10px 10px;" /></a> <br />
There has been a spate of death notices circulating in the Australian public sphere over the last few years. Essays and articles reporting both the death of the literary novel and the death of social democracy continue to proliferate in journals and broadsheets. Regarding these social democratic death notices, this tradition of mourning echoes back at least to Mark Latham’s 1998 third-way manifesto <em>Civilising Global Capital</em> where he argues that ‘The need for a fresh assessment of the politics of the Left has rarely seemed more urgent . . . Large slabs of post-war social democratic thinking have been made moribund by the new political economy of globalisation’ (Latham xxxvi). More recently, in a <em>Quarterly Essay</em> titled ‘What’s Left? The death of social democracy’ Clive Hamilton, writes that:<br />
<blockquote><br />
In the early 1970s, a crisis in the world economy caused a tectonic shift in the realm of politics. In short, social democracy was mugged by stagflation – a combination of high unemployment and high inflation. <br />
<br />
In Australia, the Whitlam government was a spectacular casualty of th[is] new dispensation. Whitlam’s prediction on the 11th of November 1975 that nothing would save the Governor-General proved incorrect: the Dismissal was not just the end of a government that had dreams grander than “responsible economic management”, it also marked the beginning of the end of the era of social democracy. The ghost of the Whitlam government has stalked the Labor party ever since, turning visionary reformers into cautious economic managers desperate to prove that they can be trusted to put their hands on the economic levers.<br />
(Hamilton 7)</blockquote><br />
<br />
These post-mortems on the death of Left politics, which are haunted by the ghost or spectre of a political leader and his government, are also accompanied by reports on the death of Australian literary fiction. For example, journalist and non-fiction writer, Mark Mordue in a 2003 <em>Sydney Morning Herald </em>essay titled, ‘Is the novel dead?’ answers: ‘Fiction is dead. Long live non-fiction’ (Mordue par. 1). Mordue argues that similar articles expressing anxiety over Australian literature’s death are often a call for a literary fiction which is social realist in form and content: a political fiction that engages with the real contemporary world of social class and working lives (Mordue par. 19). In this vein Malcolm Knox, in a recent essay in <em>Overland</em>, writes that ‘Original writing derives from real life, from the real world, from the concrete’ (11). Knox ties this production of, and reading sensitivity to, original writing to a call for a renewal of a politically Left literary aesthetic: the truth that will defeat the lies of the Howard Government is formed from defamiliarising the banalities of literary fiction’s stock images (Knox 11). Mordue, however, questions fiction’s capacity for such a return to the real; it’s former reading audience now finding their desire for it increasingly fulfilled in non-fiction:<br />
<br />
<blockquote>was [there] a growing conflict between the nature of “art” and the project of engagement in this country? The boom in non-fiction certainly suggested some missing connection, a breach in fiction’s ability to commune with a public it had somehow forgotten or left behind. (Mordue par. 7)</blockquote><br />
<br />
Taking a more materialist line on this death of fiction debate Mark Davis ties the two deaths together:<br />
<br />
<blockquote>the decline of the literary paradigm can be understood in terms of broader social and governmental shifts related to globalisation, such as the decline of post-war consensus (‘welfare state’) politics and their supplanting by a new consensus based on around free-market notions of deregulation, privatisation and trade liberalisation, and the rise of the global information economy. Seen in these terms the decline of the literary paradigm isn’t simply to do with literature; it’s to do with a broader reconceptualisation of the public sphere itself. (Davis 5)</blockquote><br />
<br />
What to make of these two, perhaps connected, deaths – of social democracy and literary fiction – is what I will explore here through Amanda Lohrey’s 1988 novel <em>The Reading Group</em>. In particular I will follow two suggestions already made in the death notices above: firstly, Clive Hamilton’s suggestion that Whitlam’s ghost haunts the contemporary Labor party, and secondly, Mark Davis’ suggestion that the decline of the literary paradigm is entwined with the public sphere itself being reconceptualized.<br />
<br />
<strong>The ghost of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gough_Whitlam">Whitlam</a>.</strong><br />
Amanda Lohrey was born in 1947 and raised in Hobart in a working-class family that had strong connections to the trade union movement (Mead par. 3). Her first novel, <em>The Morality of Gentlemen</em>, published in 1984, revisits a Hobart waterfront dispute from the 1950s in the middle of the Menzies era, when the spectre of communism was cause for intense political battles for the hearts and minds of the industrial left, resulting in the split of the labour movement. Lohrey was educated at the University of Tasmania, taking a degree in Political Science and received a scholarship to study at Cambridge University, where she read social theory (Mead par. 3). Her husband, Andrew Lohrey held a seat in the Tasmanian House of Assembly, as a Labor Party member, from 1972 to 1986 and was for a time Minister for Primary Industries (Mead par. 3)<br />
Her second novel, <em>The Reading Group</em>, reflects these biographical traces, and one aspect of its political mimesis was considered defamatory enough that a writ was served and the initial print run scraped and republished with the offending lines removed (Wilde 475).<br />
<br />
<em>The Reading Group</em> can been called an elegy for the intellectual left. It is certainly that, but it is also a novelistic post-mortem on a specific social formation after–Whitlam. The novel tracks, through a series of almost discontinuous tableaux, the lives of eight former members of a reading group who have lost the utopian and revolutionary hopes that they previously invested in the labour movement. After-Whitlam time, in the novel, is a time of privatised utopias (Lohrey, TRG 268-9), of drought and permanent bush fires (41), of menacing plague-bearers(63), and a new patriotism that is fiercely marketed (45-6). Liberalism is condemned as indecisive and weak by a conservative poet in late-night television monologues (54), and the state vacillates over whether or not to declare a state of emergency (248-54). Meanwhile, the former reading group members continue on, channelling their revolutionary desires into: Don Juan-like conquests (26-8); restoring a home to an idealised Victorian purity (10-11); seeking the moment of an amalgamated political-poetic-sexual conversion (221-8); a knightly crusade to save just one of the underclass (89-92); attaining political power through being an indispensably coherent ministerial advisor (42-3). The novel ends with the fires still burning, decisions of state deferred, bombs exploding. No one really develops, no one comes to any transforming decisions or self-knowledge, the aporias and contradictions of their uoptias passed over, the menace remains.<br />
The novel’s final word goes to the potential pederast high school teacher, Lyndon Hughes, who tells us :<br />
<blockquote>I don’t sneer at utopia. I’d never be that crass. It’s just that I live for the utopia of the present. It’s a <strong>utopia of space</strong>, not of time. It’s a life lived with an intense awareness of its own space. Of where my body is now. Who’s the philosopher here? I’m the philosopher. (268 emphasis added)</blockquote><br />
<br />
A spatial utopia makes literal sense, as utopia is of space rather than temporality. But in our imaginations utopias are usually before or behind us: their perfection haunts the present from the past as much as from the future. In modernity utopia is usually before us - in the future - and its promise is mostly cast in terms of revolution, rather than evolution or reform. When the planets are aligned, and things fall into place, there is potential for revolution. This alignment is timely and thereby temporal. Time becomes full and opportune, ripe for decisive action (<em>kairos</em>).<br />
The slogan of Gough Whitlam’s 1972 election campaign was ‘It’s time’:<br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhugX7AJjElztUe6Zxkkr1moQRIqcfODgRxmZXN0RigTz4nA7Knasxsq1JijIE-5fQE1-H4aGtE2uCXL5bz2Q4PAUigSEZ8QnCQYgUA3QhgIhq9tYkBBVPKHBeqvbiOp4dKKkLZU41qKcO_/s1600-h/140px-ItsTimeSpeech.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5175182576988823266" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhugX7AJjElztUe6Zxkkr1moQRIqcfODgRxmZXN0RigTz4nA7Knasxsq1JijIE-5fQE1-H4aGtE2uCXL5bz2Q4PAUigSEZ8QnCQYgUA3QhgIhq9tYkBBVPKHBeqvbiOp4dKKkLZU41qKcO_/s400/140px-ItsTimeSpeech.jpg" style="cursor: hand; cursor: pointer; float: left; margin: 0 10px 10px 0;" /></a><br />
<blockquote>Men and women of Australia!<br />
The decision we will make for our country on the 2nd of December is a choice between the past and the future. There are moments in history when the whole fate and future of nations can be decided in a single decision. For Australia, this is such a time. It’s time . . . (Whitlam par. 1)</blockquote><br />
<br />
<em>The Reading Group</em> is allegorical and symbolic in its settings and temporalities: a place like Hobart but not quite; and a time in the near future like the Fraser years, Labor’s interregnum, before the coming of Hawke, the messiah. But maybe Hawke is part of that near future too (Lohrey, TRG 202-4). This elusive disjointedness could be called after-Whitlam time for the intellectual left. Whitlam’s ghost haunts the characters like the ghost of King Hamlet haunts Hamlet . After-Whitlam, after Whitlam’s timeliness, time is out of joint for the intellectual left.(Derrida)<br />
<br />
<strong>The public sphere of letters.</strong><br />
Speaking to a reading group at Sydney University after the publication of her novel, Lohrey gave some background to her own motivations in writing this elegy for the intellectual left after-Whitlam:<br />
<blockquote>Some of us were young at a time when there was a great Utopian vision and didn’t want to grow up to be Yuppies. What a let down. There was this great flare in Australia. This brief flare in the 70s. Whatever you think of Whitlam and his extraordinary Government, there was this great flare of, “Goodness it’s all possible! Let’s change the National Anthem, let’s perhaps think about republicanism. Let’s get out of Vietnam. Let’s recognise China. Let’s do all these things and see what happens!” You know, it was almost like a fictional process. Let’s shuffle the deck. And people got very excited and felt the sense of possibility, of trying out the new. And then it all imploded. It all deflated for various reasons and we’d all have our own stories to tell about that, depending on our experience. (Lohrey, <em>Writers in Action</em> 210)</blockquote><br />
<br />
<em>The Reading Group</em> is Lohrey’s story about the aftermath of a political time, Whitlam time, that was so full and ripe with the promise of possibilities that it was almost like a fictional process. Although only 10 when Governor General Kerr dismissed Whitlam the promises of Whitlamism still haunt me.<br />
Lohrey’s novel asks: How do we read and write after this promise has died? And it begins to answer this question by asking what a reading group, and by extension, what writing fiction, can actually mean and do for Left politics. In Mark Davis’ terms this amounts to a fictional inquiry into the literary paradigm. In Jurgen Habermas’ terms, an inquiry into the literary public sphere, or the public sphere of letters.<br />
<br />
For Habermas the mature, or political bourgeois public sphere of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries develops from a new sense of privateness represented in epistolary novels such as Richardson’s <em>Pamela </em>(Habermas 43, 48). The psychological intimacy of the letter form makes its way into novels and these intimate, and yet publicly addressed, forms provide the means with which the rising bourgeoisie will judge, reflect and learn in order to work out what models and implications their new privateness promises (Habermas 48-51). This literary precursor public sphere develops in the institutions, such as journals, periodicals, salons and coffee houses, through which literary models of a new privateness become a question to be answered through critical judgement and reason (Habermas 31-43). In an age when monarchical, church and aristocratic power was being challenged by the rising capitalist class, public authority, no longer paraded before subjects and no longer practised in secret, was opening up to such critical judgements (Habermas 27-31). The political public sphere, for Habermas, evolves out of its literary precursor as this new privateness becomes essentially human: located in the intimate domestic family home and thereby separate from the ascendant constitutional, administrative and military state (Habermas 51-6). The mature political public sphere, which is a powerful imaginary or ideal in liberal democratic capitalism, is a virtual space where private people come together to deliberate the terms and decisions of public authority and its regulations (Habermas 27).<br />
<br />
What I’m interested in here is Habermas’ suggestive notion that it is the child that gives birth to the adult public sphere. To put this idea back into Lohrey’s terrain and temporality, what hope is there for a literary public sphere after-Whitlam? In other words if, as Habermas suggests, a mature public sphere is developed out of its literary precursor, then what sort of new privateness, after-Whitlam, might this precursor public sphere generate?<br />
<br />
‘They used to have a reading group. It had been a waste of time really, an old fashioned idea that no seriously active person would ever bother with’ (Lohrey, TRG 29). In the time of the reading group they are all still members of the Australian Labor Party, although their participation is experienced as a laborious, frustrating grind (Lohrey, TRG 32). <a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh6GYZayuxRb08PpcMxSTPxQJfk7fgQPptaG6yzojvmpZFdNRmEqC-gyS1Sf_8RaA_ydVm0Yk22Sv7w18pS1EdujhSpawcEIS3kI4xobxXg73m36z04pdhdVQZmhQAXKZGLD6clDyN7kBnI/s1600-h/180px-Latham-Hawke.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5175185677955211010" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh6GYZayuxRb08PpcMxSTPxQJfk7fgQPptaG6yzojvmpZFdNRmEqC-gyS1Sf_8RaA_ydVm0Yk22Sv7w18pS1EdujhSpawcEIS3kI4xobxXg73m36z04pdhdVQZmhQAXKZGLD6clDyN7kBnI/s400/180px-Latham-Hawke.jpg" style="cursor: hand; cursor: pointer; float: right; margin: 0 0 10px 10px;" /></a>The novel hints at what Peter Beilharz calls the labour movement’s mania for policy in this interregnum period between Whitlam and Hawke: the disciplined factional machinery of the party preparing it for government; the discourse of economic rationalism filtering down into the branch level; the Accord and the deregulation of finance are just around the corner (Beliharz 102-30).<br />
<br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj2QygjQmdTgFKyTy2bsfpnWGDz1ofWa99M0zGPdQX_rbXJysTAQDOdlX8eQ7Q9xsxZ11A_Mo2uKgICnEXx9NtotfbHd3V2uqBGJpBXIPTh1GSMr1JglKAFCka9LS5gnkhzqGyV_TTYTDqB/s1600-h/180px-Morris_dancing_at_wells_arp.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5175189573490548498" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj2QygjQmdTgFKyTy2bsfpnWGDz1ofWa99M0zGPdQX_rbXJysTAQDOdlX8eQ7Q9xsxZ11A_Mo2uKgICnEXx9NtotfbHd3V2uqBGJpBXIPTh1GSMr1JglKAFCka9LS5gnkhzqGyV_TTYTDqB/s400/180px-Morris_dancing_at_wells_arp.jpg" style="cursor: hand; cursor: pointer; float: right; margin: 0 0 10px 10px;" /></a>They attempt to read political philosophy mainly, so as to work out the rationale underlying the Labor party machine (Lohrey, TRG 33-34). The political organiser and academic Sam argues that such collective reading will help them to learn the dance-steps of politics; to anticipate and perhaps lead:<br />
<br />
<blockquote>Sam [said] that politics was a form of dancing: you had to know the steps. And the steps changed all the time; so that just when you’d learnt one set the formation would change, or the formation would stay the same but the tempo would alter . . .<br />
Renata had asked the obvious question: she didn’t see how reading could improve your dancing. Listening, maybe, but to what?<br />
Well, said Sam, you had to know how to listen, you had to know how to interpret the code, and since all concepts came back to words, reading could help you to anticipate. And in any form of dancing, any structured form of dancing, he’d corrected himself, every step has a name.<br />
So, you could teach yourself dancing from a book?<br />
Sam didn’t see why not; after all, you could teach yourself yoga from a book.<br />
Yes, said Renata, but yoga isn’t done to a beat, except that of your breathing. In music there was a rhythm that the body had to experience for itself.<br />
True, but you didn’t have to hear it played; all you had to do was to learn how to read music.<br />
Renata had given up at this point. There was something wrong with this argument of Sam’s, she knew, but she couldn’t pinpoint it, not towards the end of a meal with a head hazy from Andrew’s Beaujolais. (29-30 emphasis in original)</blockquote><br />
<br />
Renata’s doubts cast aside the eight reading group members push on. They struggle to read Gramsci and Plato in the living room (34); it soon falls apart:<br />
<blockquote>[T]here was something faintly ridiculous and Victorian about a reading group. Reading groups were for fanatics or Trotskyists, people who were fringe or impotent, or for middle-aged housewives who had nothing better to do with their time. Reading with other people was unsophisticated, uncool: reading was something you did alone. (33-4)</blockquote><br />
<br />
This desire for a reading group, especially one that reads political philosophy, is structurally in keeping with Habermas’ narrative of the genesis of the mature public sphere. In a sense such a desire is like a ghost in the machinery of modernity, returning periodically in different places, in different times. But in this novel the intellectual left after-Whitlam finds that such a collective reading is too spectral to make that transition from the literary to the political public sphere. Their utopian energies, their desires for revolution, turn inward. Unable to read the rhythms of their own desires as a relation between the private and the public, they are both not in and out of time. They lack a felt-sense of the rhythms of the times: the revolutionary time they heard in and projected onto Whitlam(ism) becomes the lost object of a Left melancholy that breaks out in the novel’s proliferating moments of mania.<br />
<br />
Stephen Knight, in his <em>Scripsi</em> critique of <em>The Reading Group</em>, argues that the novel’s politics are created formally: that its (near) futurism; allegorical context; and deployment of Brecht’s alienation technique, interrogate the expressive realism of its characters, situations and institutions (Knight 204-5). These formal politics make any mimetic reading of the novel impossible.<br />
<br />
So, finally, on the one hand, by interrogating the relations between reading, writing and public-political activity, Lohrey suggests that the moment of Whitlamism’s social democracy and its complementary literary paradigm is a dead or lost object against which the work of Left mourning can begin its labour. On this reading the novel is a work of mourning that rather than presenting the positive objects and projects of new political-libidinal investments, negates such a presentation through the dystopia of its allegorical contexts. This technique of negation, Knight argues, gives the novel the power to think (Knight 204-5). And yet, on the other hand, the novel’s formal politics is also a politics of temporal rhythm which suggests that the time of revolution might be less an opening called out by, and read off from, escalating crises than by the structure of rhythmic feeling writing and reading listens for and works to perform: perhaps a new set of relations between the intimate private and the political public spheres represented in the public sphere of letters.<br />
<br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgKtiAAJFoK6O6NVn0_EQ1HQhJOLCSpBEj3brePP7LCAb7PKLT9m-etDvcOyOAraT9bcR-SeKGhn371mSpoFVgcEmA1ZySAJtJdA5Qap1hHzpljNbNB6ZWUtChSHd305SM02D288fiZYzXV/s1600-h/180px-Two_dancers.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5175190067411787554" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgKtiAAJFoK6O6NVn0_EQ1HQhJOLCSpBEj3brePP7LCAb7PKLT9m-etDvcOyOAraT9bcR-SeKGhn371mSpoFVgcEmA1ZySAJtJdA5Qap1hHzpljNbNB6ZWUtChSHd305SM02D288fiZYzXV/s400/180px-Two_dancers.jpg" style="cursor: hand; cursor: pointer; float: left; margin: 0 10px 10px 0;" /></a><br />
<br />
Stephen Knight ends his untimely critique of <em>The Reading Group</em> arguing that he finds in Lohrey’s novel her hope for a <strong>writable future </strong>for radical Australia (Knight 207). But a writable future that dances in step and time with the present, that thinks rhythmically, sounds even more promising. <em>The Reading Group</em> makes such a promise.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<strong>Works Cited</strong><br />
Beilharz, Peter. <em>Transforming labor: labour tradition and the labor decade in Australia</em>. Oakleigh: Cambridge UP, 1994.<br />
<br />
Davis, Mark. “The decline of the literary paradigm in Australian publishing.” [see sidebar for link]<br />
<br />
Derrida, Jacques. <em>Specters of Marx: the state of the debt, the work of mourning and the New International</em>. Trans. Peggy Kamuf. New York: Routledge, 1994. <br />
<br />
Habermas, Jurgen. <em>The structural transformation of the public sphere: an inquiry into a category of bourgeois society.</em> Trans. Thomas Burger. Cambridge: Polity, 1989.<br />
<br />
Hamilton, Clive. “What’s left? The death of social democracy.” <em>Quarterly Essay 21</em> Melbourne: Black Inc., 2006.<br />
<br />
Knight, Stephen. “A writable future.” <em>Scripsi</em> 5.2 (1989): 203-207.<br />
<br />
Knox, Malcolm. “The case for ‘Original’ Australian fiction.” <em>Overland</em> 182 (2006): 4 – 11.[see sidebar for link]<br />
<br />
Latham, Mark. <em>Civilising global capital: new thinking for Australian Labor</em>. St Leonards: Allen and Unwin, 1998.<br />
<br />
Lefebvre, Henri. <em>Rhythmanalysis: space, time and everyday life</em>. Trans. Stuart Elden and Gerald Moore. London: Continuum, 2004.<br />
<br />
Lohrey, Amanda. <em>The morality of gentlemen</em>. Chippendale: Picador, 1984.<br />
<br />
___. <em>The reading group</em>. Chippendale: Picador, 1988.<br />
<br />
___. ‘Amanda Lohrey: The reading group’ Ed. Gerry Turcotte.<em> Writers in action: the writers choice evenings</em>. Paddington: Currency, 1990. 205 – 224.<br />
<br />
Mead, Jenna. ‘Amanda Lohrey’ entry in <em>Dictionary of Literary Biography</em>. [awaiting publication]<br />
<br />
Mordue, Mark. “Is the novel dead?” Essay, 25 January 2003. <em>Sydney Morning Herald</em>. 11 July 2004 <http.www.smh.com.au>.<br />
<br />
Whitlam, Gough. “It's Time For Leadership.” Policy Speech for the Australian Labor Party at the Blacktown Civic Centre, 13 November 1972. 8 May 2006<br />
<br />
‘Lohrey, Amanda’ entry in <em>The Oxford companion to Australian literature</em>. Ed. William H. Wilde, Joy Hooton, and Barry Andrews. 2nd ed. Melbourne: Oxford UP, 1994: 475.<br />
<br />
[From ASAL 2006 Conference paper]</http.www.smh.com.au>Michael Chttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03997773018535384710noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8244167267206207060.post-61539289958200226822011-06-27T06:47:00.000+10:002011-06-27T06:47:44.641+10:00Reads like teen spirit: Australian Grunge Fiction<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh_k_RvB2xMGrD0KdW8Udp7J-tw5crDa30ZmupTnQxyIDQ94g_Vup-x-vPvOkl_NTmfieUYwNQ_WQ-OfAOP6-svxEh3dm3_3IpjgvdP5XpgYCY8Ym8YNQbrDAH4jNsHLnlgX7Jy2yTiRFwB/s1600-h/200px-Head_On_1998_film.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5170513584564453234" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh_k_RvB2xMGrD0KdW8Udp7J-tw5crDa30ZmupTnQxyIDQ94g_Vup-x-vPvOkl_NTmfieUYwNQ_WQ-OfAOP6-svxEh3dm3_3IpjgvdP5XpgYCY8Ym8YNQbrDAH4jNsHLnlgX7Jy2yTiRFwB/s400/200px-Head_On_1998_film.jpg" style="cursor: hand; float: left; margin: 0px 10px 10px 0px;" /></a><br />
<div>It’s difficult to listen to Nirvana without hearing omens of Kurt Cobain’s suicide. Suicide floods songs, and other art forms, with meanings that explain the emotions and symbols in song lyrics, in the way the song is sung, in its timbres and tempo. Jim Morrison from the Doors – an accidental death, or overdose – Ian Curtis from Joy Division – suicide by hanging: two figures whose baritonal excursions into the dark side are given an endorsement by their early deaths. This is the End – ahh, of course! Love will tear us apart – chilling, full of foreboding. Listening to and watching Cobain, Morrison and Curtis we feel we can know and feel that they are expressing suicidal emotions and obsessive thoughts of mortality.<br />
<br />
It’s hard then to go back to the moment of Nirvana’s global emergence. Back to 1991 and the song Smells like teen spirit. You might remember the video: the band is set up in a high school gym, various subgroups of American teen culture in the bleachers, cheerleaders shaking their pom poms, one with the Anarchy symbol on her top, Kurt Cobain in a striped long sleeved T-shirt his bleached-blonde hair long and stringy, covering his eyes, as the band grind out the heavy verses, moving into overdrive for the anthemic chorus: Here we are now, entertain us. By the video’s end there’s a riot going on: the gym floor has been invaded, the drums are being attacked, and Cobain is screaming ‘No denial’.<br />
<br />
It’s an angry song, even one of desperation, but hardly a premonition of suicide. There’s something else going on in that song and I don’t think this something else can be explained by Kurt Cobain’s suicide. In fact, the meanings that we make of songs like Smells like teen spirit might be less guided by the expression of the artist’s soul, and more by our own needs to find a form for making sense of the world we live in. Smells like teen spirit is, I think, a perfect example of a form that helped a mass of people make sense of the world. Not by explaining the world, but more by providing four and a bit minutes of song which performed the feeling of the contradictions of teen spirit.<br />
<br />
What do I mean by the feeling of the contradictions of teen spirit? Just a touch of theory by way of explanation. One of the founders of Cultural Studies, Raymond Williams, argued that culture was not only ordinary - that you didn’t need a degree in fine arts to consume it in galleries because culture was how you walked and talked everyday - but that its expressions were structured feelings: or producing a structure of feeling. This is Williams:<br />
<br />
“[I]t was a structure in the sense that you could perceive it operating in one work after another which wasn’t otherwise connected – people weren’t learning it from each other; yet it was one of feeling much more than thought – a pattern of impulses, restraints, tones.” [from Politics and letters: Interviews with the New Left, London New Left Books, 1979: 159 ]<br />
<br />
What a great way of defining a genre like grunge: ‘ a structure operating in one work after another which wasn’t otherwise connected.’<br />
<br />
Smells like teen spirit read this way, as structure of feeling, is an ambivalent text that oscillates between a sludgey spaced-out futility, and a dense, explosive anger that accelerates, then brakes, accelerates again. It veers between slowdown and speed-up: the vocal tone moves from sarcasm to sincerity; a hatred directed both inward and outward and an idealism that is blocked. Lyrically, and more importantly in Cobain’s timbre, is a feeling of abjection, of something debasing that he’s reached deep into himself to eject but can’t - it remains stuck in his throat and belly. A denial, that can’t be blasted out through speed or power.<br />
<br />
The lyric of Smells like teen spirit has as its central subject youth culture: the teen spirit that the form of the song is so ambivalent about. The lyric demands that youth culture be about more than entertainment: that was a central promise of rock music, and punk in particular. But in the end, well whatever, Nevermind.<br />
<br />
Nirvana try to breathe their teen spirit into one of post-war youth culture’s key forms: the rock song. But here youth as a symbol of speed and revolt is rendered in a deeply ambivalent text that also presents youth culture as a sludge-like state that is too slow and thick to storm the barricades. Let’s trash the gym then go to the mall for a cheeseburger deluxe with fries.<br />
<br />
Smells like teen spirit sounds like a last gasp call to arms for a dominant version of youth culture. Has rock progressed since Grunge? I don’t follow the game closely enough anymore, but the song sounds like the last rebellion in the line that runs from the Velvet Underground through the Stooges to Joy Division: Nirvana stage a revolution that is exhausted before it begins.<br />
<br />
So, Nirvana’s smells like teen spirit as a structure of feeling – a form of song, a structure with a conventional verse/ chorus/ solo format – that provided a compelling aural text for feeling your way into the world in 1991-92. Grunge becomes a buzzword and a subculture in the West.<br />
<br />
In the same year Brisbane based novelist Andrew McGahan writes <em>Praise</em> which is retrospectively nominated as the germinal Australian Grunge novel. Late 1991 is also the time, in Australia, of growing unemployment queues: the aftermath of the recession of 1990. If youth is a key symbol of modernisation, of speed, then what happens to this symbol in a time of slow-down or recession? What happens to teen spirit as an idea, as a feeling, when an economy gets ill and decelerates?<br />
<br />
This slow-down in growth was diagnosed, by the newly minted Prime Minister Paul Keating, as being caused by endemic blockages in the economic body. There were clogged, sclerotic arteries in need of clearing so as to get the financial blood flowing quicker. The prescription was for more economic reform: more flexibility, open-ness, youthful vitality.<br />
<br />
So, I’ve taken a leap into a strange hybrid of economic and medical discourse here. Not much of a leap when you consider that the current economic crisis – the sub prime crisis based in the US– is often referred to as a contagion that might infect other economies. Bodies that get ill can also be filled with teen spirit and, I’m arguing, these symbols of youth become highly contradictory and problematic in the period of the early to mid 1990s.<br />
This problem emerges in a stream of art and popular culture: grunge – grunge music and grunge fiction. And it emerges with some force because the youthful speed demanded for further economic reform clashes head on with a strain of youth culture that had operated in terms of its own superior cultural and social speed pitting itself against the authority of the state and the commodification of the markets.<br />
<br />
What then happens when the state authorises a speed-up in the process of commodification through the symbols of youth? In other words if youth is the symbolic means by which economic modernisation is promoted by politicians like Paul Keating, by the youthful Bill Clinton, then where does teen spirit go to in order to rebel. I think you can hear the sound of this grinding of the gears in Nirvana’s song which speeds up and slows down in turn.<br />
<br />
Four years later, in 1995, a new genre of Australian fiction emerged under the name of grunge. Christos Tsiolkas’ short novel, <em>Loaded </em>[adapted as the 1998 film <em>Head On</em>], was one of a number of these novels marketed and debated within a critical literary discourse which tended to interpret these novels as autobiographical and realistic representations of an urban youth culture that was out to shock and that had lost its way. <em>Loaded</em> narrates twentyfour hours in the life of 19 year old Ari Voulis, as he tells us about his journey and experiences through the four corners of suburban Melbourne. A first generation migrant, who is jobless and gay, Ari’s day is fuelled by a constant ingestion of drugs, of masturbation and sex in backlanes and beats, endless fights, flights and refusals, the tentative beginnings of a romance and a soundtrack that accompanies his movements and dancing throughout the city and its places.<br />
<br />
The pace of his day matches his main drug choices: speed for acceleration and aggression and marijuana for relaxing and slowing down. His fundamental tone is one of refusal and sarcasm but this is mixed with moments of tenderness and sincerity, especially for his family and his best friend Johnny, a transivestite. His hatred is directed both out and inwardly. And he thrives on abjection, seeking it in sex and also from the insults of his father.<br />
<br />
<em>Loaded</em> is a more complex text than Smells like teen spirit, but it too is deeply ambivalent about teen spirit or youth as a symbol. Ari is torn in three directions: a wog who hates wogs, gay but afraid of being identified as a faggot and working-class in a time of residual solidarity. Ari begins the novel waking at his brother’s student share house in East Melbourne, and ends it in the West in his family-home on his bed, exhausted, waiting for sleep. He has moved and danced through the four corners of suburban Melbourne, but hasn’t developed or really gone anywhere. Rather than self-formation Ari’s self is internally split three ways; rather than integrating into the world, Ari thrives on its abject sites and refuses its basic demand: that he get a job and settle down. Although a highly compressed narrative Loaded is a failed coming of age novel: a de-formation novel. It reads like teen spirit in crisis.<br />
So, reading grunge fiction as though it is the expression of authentic adolescent feelings, misses another way of interpreting that reads through structures of feeling, and that reads youth as a symbol rather than as a fact. We can read Kurt Cobain’s suicide into his songs, into his singing performances, but this can’t explain why Nirvana were so timely, so instantly, globally embraced. When grunge is read against a dominant national and international response to recession that speeds up the processes of reform and uses the language of youthfulness to persuade the polity to modernise the economic body, such a reading suggests that what this modernising body abjects or expels enters the symbolic field of youth. Grunge seems like a pretty accurate name for this return of the abject body, during and after a recession. Ari the narrator in Loaded says:<br />
<br />
“There is a last, and very cherished, urban myth. That every new generation has it better that the one that came before it. Bullshit. I am surfing on the down-curve of capital. The generations after this one are not going to build on the peasants’ landholdings. There’s no jobs, no work, no factories, no wage packet, no half-acre block. There is no more land. I am sliding towards the sewer. I’m not even struggling against the flow. I can smell the pungent aroma of shit, but I’m still breathing.” (<em>Loaded</em> 144)<br />
<br />
Is this teen spirit, or does it just read like it?<br />
<br />
[From a paper presented at Utas Postgraduate Conference, 21 September, 2007] </div>Michael Chttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03997773018535384710noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8244167267206207060.post-19813686743531997122011-06-26T21:13:00.002+10:002011-06-27T06:41:28.321+10:00Reading and rhythm<div>[An older draft post. Better out than in].<br />
<br />
I’m currently searching for, and developing, a theory of rhythm which is at the same time one of reading. Elizabeth Deeds Ermarth, in <a href="http://books.google.com.au/books?hl=en&id=i5gm0vx6wmwC&dq=Deeds+Ermarth&printsec=frontcover&source=web&ots=aFn0HPSBJf&sig=ipe_ZQN6uJyIDpovxS3QdAm-KFY"><em>Sequel to History: Postmodernism and the Crisis of representational time</em> </a>is useful here as she conceives of reading ‘postmodern’ fiction as being a co-creative improvisation. Is this what we are invited to do in, or with, Anthony Macris’ novel <em><a href="http://eurhythmania.blogspot.com/2008/04/in-cosmopolitan-underground-anthony.html">Capital, volume one</a></em>? To co-compose as we move with the <a href="http://eurhythmania.blogspot.com/2008/02/labor-representation-value.html">generative <em>mise en abyme</em></a><em></em>’s machinic and organic oscillations and pulsations? Is the sound of, the rhythms of <em>Capital, volume one</em> like the sound that Robert Fink describes as the <a href="http://eurhythmania.blogspot.com/2008/04/notes-on-sociology-of-musical-form-and.html">‘media sublime’</a>? What does it feel like ('feel' here to include structured feeling in Raymond Williams' sense of emerging cultural forms as <a href="http://eurhythmania.blogspot.com/2008/02/reads-like-teen-spirit-australian.html">'structures of feeling'</a>) to read rhythmically?<br />
<br />
If <a href="http://eurhythmania.blogspot.com/2008/02/reads-like-teen-spirit-australian.html">grunge literature </a>attempts to use dissonance (<em><a href="http://eurhythmania.blogspot.com/2008/04/youthful-convulsions-epilepsy-in-three.html">Three dollars</a></em> resolves its dissonance into consonance) alongside its temporalities of abjection, drug-use states, and thereby has one foot in the universe of tonality-representation (to use the language of Attali, Adorno, Ermarth et al: the key point here is that there are <a href="http://eurhythmania.blogspot.com/2008/04/notes-on-sociology-of-musical-form-and.html">multiple ways out of scale and tonality </a>– out of harmony, representation, exchange, consent and consensus), then Macris’s novel is drawing on a different, more French heritage of thought and practice to write outside of tonality and representation: to write so that the reader is moved – so that the reader must dance in order to read. And yet content, rather than just form, is central to understanding Macris’ novel for the 'bouncing ball', the floor lights that flash the next dance-step position, are not movements shaped by the cosmopolitan tourist’s new purchase or discovery, or by the movement toward redemption or reconciliation or creation – the movement here is constellated within the journeys of a milieu of discarded commodities, of forms that have expired, of the drive to satisfy the fetish of the commodity. Alongside the body of the reader are the bodies of the text’s things: the lucozade bottle, the pregnant mouse.<br />
<br />
To draw back into another novel under consideration in the thesis, we find in Amanda Lohrey’s <em><a href="http://eurhythmania.blogspot.com/2008/03/haunted-by-revolution-whitlams-ghost.html">The Reading Group</a></em> a key passage that sets this train of thought in motion. Disillusioned with late 1970s orthodox Labourist politics, the literary agent Renata attends a reading group of friends and former Left activists which is seeking to reignite Left political revolutionary feeling. During the initial meeting Renata wonders at a homology between reading politically and dancing as political leadership. What is touched on just at the edge of thought (a line from David Malouf's <em><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remembering_Babylon">Remembering Babylon</a></em>) for Renata is the sense that while reading is able to ingest codes and systems (the steps of politics) it is also something rhythmic, something felt in the same way that rhythm is felt in the body.<br />
<br />
<br />
<blockquote>Sam [said] that politics was a form of dancing: you had to know the steps. And the steps changed all the time; so that just when you’d learnt one set the formation would change, or the formation would stay the same but the tempo would alter . . .<br />
Renata had asked the obvious question: she didn’t see how reading could improve your dancing. Listening, maybe, but to what?<br />
Well, said Sam, you had to know how to listen, you had to know how to interpret the code, and since all concepts came back to words, reading could help you to anticipate. And in any form of dancing, any structured form of dancing, he’d corrected himself, every step has a name.<br />
So, you could teach yourself dancing from a book?<br />
Sam didn’t see why not; after all, you could teach yourself yoga from a book.<br />
Yes, said Renata, but yoga isn’t done to a beat, except that of your breathing. In music there was a rhythm that the body had to experience for itself.<br />
True, but you didn’t have to hear it played; all you had to do was to learn how to read music.<br />
Renata had given up at this point. There was something wrong with this argument of Sam’s, she knew, but she couldn’t pinpoint it, not towards the end of a meal with a head hazy from Andrew’s Beaujolais. (<em>The Reading Group </em>29-30)<br />
<br />
<br />
[T]here was something faintly ridiculous and Victorian about a reading group. Reading groups were for fanatics or Trotskyists, people who were fringe or impotent, or for middle-aged housewives who had nothing better to do with their time. Reading with other people was unsophisticated, uncool: reading was something you did alone. (33-4)</blockquote><br />
<br />
Thus we come to a hard core of one of the questions at the base of this thesis: what, if anything, gets [read] into novels? Is there something material, something spiritual, something historical, something bodily-rhythmic that manages to lodge itself in novels and becomes, for the better ones, the content and substance upon which the reader’s identifications and empathies are then made to loop back through the reflective prompts of formal (aesthetic) ethics and politics?<br />
<br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEinw53XVonHMNIsRPNa4DLJk3iqvhoyVG8Gdtb40T65OiqB8YjS4NcIXhLdHZybYVtT4j7QzTSa8N2JlG01VJK7mxEupfKjh5YDMUzvCJgPDWqV1eWCoHgBfb5EgKjliFHQPb5_hyyPQhJ0/s1600-h/Brisbane+trip+%26+Snug+pix+2007+001.JPG"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5194656679022924882" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEinw53XVonHMNIsRPNa4DLJk3iqvhoyVG8Gdtb40T65OiqB8YjS4NcIXhLdHZybYVtT4j7QzTSa8N2JlG01VJK7mxEupfKjh5YDMUzvCJgPDWqV1eWCoHgBfb5EgKjliFHQPb5_hyyPQhJ0/s400/Brisbane+trip+%26+Snug+pix+2007+001.JPG" style="cursor: hand; display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" /></a><br />
<br />
Do we read, also, with our body? Do we experience rhythms in, or even through, our bodies as we read? Ermarth:<br />
<br />
<br />
<blockquote>The reader . . . has a harder time of it [Ermarth writing here about a Borges story]. The story forces reader attention into play between semantic systems, and that play is what constitutes rhythmic time. The echoes of those multiple systems shine through, pullulate, in the transparent moment, and force the reader to be aware that at any point multiple turnings are possible. Reader attention alternates between contradictory possibilities, and the rhythms of this attention cannot be reduced to statement. [68]</blockquote><br />
<br />
Macris’s novel does something similar; the two narrative threads force a switching between narrative orientations (narrator: third and first-persons, time-space, episode and mock-epic, discontinuous and continuous), between paradigms. In the London Underground [LU] thread the initial orientation is framed by the negative: by missing the train. This missed train is analogous to Ermarth’s depiction of postmodern temporality as rhythmic time: a time off the track[s]. Yet in this negativity of the LU thread the productive and generative force of the narrative is made. In other words the initial negativity is a precondition for the positivity that follows: albeit a positivity that is dirty, gritty, lacking in redemption or reconciliation, or even the satisfaction of successful (<a href="http://eurhythmania.blogspot.com/2008/02/labor-representation-value.html">Spivak's continuist</a>) commodity exchange. An incommensurability or discontinuity between the two narrative 'threads' that is not a contradiction to be resolved, or an ideologically open gap to be symptomatically filled by an (psycho) analytic meaning or truth. No. Instead the negativity of this incommensurable gap between the chapters sparks the generation-machine of the novel's secondary layer of formal movement: the rhizomic root weave of motiffs and themes, <em>mise en abyme</em>, multiplying and imploding across these gaps and ruptures.</div>Michael Chttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03997773018535384710noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8244167267206207060.post-73754143229550743062011-06-26T21:12:00.001+10:002011-06-26T21:16:19.217+10:00Avant-garde and Capital, volume one (Macris not Marx)[Another older, draft post.].<br />
<blockquote>For mediation in Benjamin has more of the character of a switch between circuits (opening a gap in Gadamer’s ‘closed circuits of historical life’, triggered by the metonymic structure of the image) than the production of a shared conceptual space, since the terms of its relations are located in different temporal dimensions.<br />
Peter Osborne, <em>The politics of time </em>: 151</blockquote><br />
<br />
The intention to produce an avant-garde novel is rarely matched by its realisation. The odds weigh heavily against success. Primarily, the reception, or consumption, of the artefact as avant-garde depends on the serendipity of the chosen form and content: for to be ahead of the contemporary is partly a gamble on behalf of the primary producer and the work-gang involved in production, manufacture, packaging, distribution, and promotion. Expensive market research might assist in this task, but such mercenary information-gathering is so antithetical to the codes of author-novelist as artist-prophet, that even the whiff of market measurement immediately removes avant-garde from our table of evaluations.<br />
<br />
Why this seems a natural response is itself interesting and something that Pierre Bourdieu has, in part, analysed and explained in his <em>The Rules of Art</em>, by way of arguing that aesthetic autonomy is a value created in opposition to economic and political power. The power of the creative work gains its critical and forerunning position because it negates and distances its immanent content from what its contemporary audience take to be the dominant poles of economic and political power, since bourgeois liberal capitalism became ascendant. <br />
<br />
However, Bourdieu’s sociological analysis of the literary field’s creation of symbolic capital , and the importance of avant-garde-ness to this type of capital, is too reliant on a sociological reading of the content of fictional narrative: in particular Gustave Flaubert’s <em>A Sentimental Education</em>, which Bourdieu models as a map of pre-1848 Paris, in which the novel’s representation of the movements and locations of socio-political-economic classes of men, with the hero Frederic Moreau structuring this literary geography, are read as an ur-map of how the rules of the literary field are both played and inaugurated. Within this genealogy of the French literary field, the avant-garde assumes its rule-like status as an innovative break in both the dominant forms and in the composition of the dominant personnel. The social break is largely driven by a biologically generational turnover. Franco Moretti, in the first chapter of his <em>Graphs, Maps, Trees</em>, concurs with Bourdieu here: generational change is homologous to generic change. <br />
<br />
This leaves the question of form. For it’s one thing to propose that generational change drives, and is at, the centre of the modern literary field’s renewal and production. But such biological new-ness has no necessary relationship to generic innovation – whether such innovation is mere bricolage is another question. And to what extent is avant-garde status, avant-garde production, aesthetic innovation only? Indeed, can avant-garde, a term with etymological roots in military discourse, have a non-political import? <br />
<br />
For Bourdieu what is innovative, and thereby a decisive instance of literary avant-garde-ness, about <em>A Sentimental Education </em>is that the novel’s realism is present in its focus on everyday events and objects, and yet the description and presentation of such everyday events and objects, is formally sophisticated – the artistry of the language is intended for its own pleasure. Art for art’s sake. The innovation here, for Bourdieu, is that literary aesthetics achieves here a form of autonomy for the text, and symbolic capital for the author, who, from the consecrated position of being judged by their peers to have achieved such autonomy (in fact negating power- business and politics), obtains a right to practice judgement over and against power. For Bourdieu, the public intellectual, in France at least, represented by Zola during the Dreyfus affair, and subsequently Sartre, derives their symbolic capital through mastering the rules of the literary field, and its version of the rules of art.<br />
<br />
However, what is conceptualised as avant-garde here, in Bourdieu’s history, or genesis as it is subtitled, is based upon an understanding of time and history which is infused with that mixture of modernity and linear progress that Walter Benjamin termed historicist. <br />
<br />
In a basic way Anthony Macris’ novel, <em>Capital, volume one</em>, pitches its claim to innovation with its dualistic structure: the chapters alternate, with the odd-numbered chapters told in third-person, present tense, set in a highly compressed time-space, and situated in sections of the London Underground train network. The even-numbered chapters are conventional, first-person micro-stories, or episodes, concerned with coming of age –style subjects; their style is reminiscent of the epicleti (little epiphanies) of paralysis classification that James Joyce gave his short story collection <em>The Dubliners</em>. But what is of particular interest here is that the London Underground narrative is both self-consciously avant-garde, and that its self-consciousness extends to the political philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari, alongside David Harvey’s Marxist geography of the condition of postmodernity. My argument here is that this degree of self-consciousness in the London Underground narrative of Macris’s novel, presents a constant switching between circuits not only within this thread of the novel, but between this thread and the other, more conventional one. <br />
<br />
Indeed, while Benjamin’s multi-temporality, his messianic time as exterior and ultimately redemptive of all of history, might be a model for how avant-garde-ness functions, for how to escape the nightmare of history, what Macris’ novel does, instead, is to generate a rhizomic root-weave of potentially live switching-points, through which the reader can enter the novel, not as a spatialized circuitry that takes time to flow or move through, but as a multi-temporal text-machine capable of generating “a ‘model’ of the Messianic, ‘shot through’ with ‘chips’ of Messianic time, a site of a ‘weak’ Messianic power.” (Osborne, 149) . . . <br />
<br />
<blockquote>We need a conceptual bridge back from now-time to a new narrativity, such that its disjunctive power might have a transformative effect on modes of identification and action. Unless we can find one, Benjamin’s ecstatic ‘now’ will remain a mere ‘time-lag’ or ‘in-between’, without historical force. (Osborne, 156)</blockquote><br />
<br />
Hypothesis: <em>Capital, volume o</em>ne attempts a now-time in its London Underground thread - an interruption in which the detritus of history doesn’t so much pile up as recombine through text, and in which the Young man is like the angel of history, blown by the wind coming in from paradise. The interruption here is signalled from the first sentence, ‘The young man in the fawn trench coat cannot wait to get off the train.’ (1). The re-seaming of this now-time, in which chips of the Messianic shoot through, into the episodes and chronotopes of the bildungs – one the key literary genres of modernity, and of modernisation – narratives, enacts this conceptual bridge of a needed new narrativity. How successfully is another matter, but I think there is a strong claim to this being part of the novel’s intent.Michael Chttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03997773018535384710noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8244167267206207060.post-59061416895565293232011-06-26T21:09:00.001+10:002011-06-26T21:15:29.229+10:00The flexible body politic: fitter and healthier for what?[An older draft post. Time to let loose].<br />
<br />
A couple of quotes from Australian author of fiction and essayist Amanda Lohrey which nail the mode of neoliberalism she detected in sections of late-1980s Sydney culture. For Lohrey 'new age' practices of self-government are displacements of earlier utopian projects. These new technologies of self focus political-libidinal investments in the individual body because that's the last space of controllable shelter and control in a time of radical reform (a term popular in the Australian mainstream media in the 1980s which referred to the privatising and deregulating policies of the Federal Labor Government).<br />
<br />
The title of Lohrey's essay is, of course, a reference to Jameson's famous essay, but something like a Foucauldian interest in the technologies of the self and the rationalities of liberalism can be seen in this essay and indeed in the trajectory of Lohrey's fiction, which shifts from the influence of aesthetic Marxisms like Brecht, Lukacs, Benjamin and Bloch's, to, as I say, a Foucauldian interest in the formations of the body and self, and in the forces of the psyche-body circuit acting in relation to social-historical changes. I think, for Lohrey, it is the role of narrative and language too on these more recent interests that make her fiction fascinating and a good resource to write PhD research from.<br />
<br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhVqKWSPbkb84dWXJy684ZbME0Y3iTuDcimZCTmgwd_NKqngR3HwN8gLJs4WTjpUowx93xNDeYUivQTDfQRlhXCCM-LJ_gR974ci5N4GBjB6JkCdLt8cGak2m3XyqYDZQA1bQVfVJrkOsQM/s1600-h/camillesbread.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5227230355096368514" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhVqKWSPbkb84dWXJy684ZbME0Y3iTuDcimZCTmgwd_NKqngR3HwN8gLJs4WTjpUowx93xNDeYUivQTDfQRlhXCCM-LJ_gR974ci5N4GBjB6JkCdLt8cGak2m3XyqYDZQA1bQVfVJrkOsQM/s400/camillesbread.jpg" style="cursor: hand; float: left; margin: 0px 10px 10px 0px;" /></a><br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
Her last two works of fiction <em>The Philosopher's Doll</em> (2004) and <em>Camille's Bread</em> (1995) move more firmly into the territory I'm attempting to describe above, after the more sustained focus on political party (Australian Labor Party) and State-based politics of the first two novels: <em>The Morality of Gentlemen </em>(1984) and <em>The Reading Group</em> (1988). Effectively Lohrey's interest in the poetics of politics, as Jenna Mead describes it, moves from a focus on the governmentality of state to one on the governmentality of the citizen-subject. Is this shift one that can be explained by her sensitivity to new social forms or is it (also, perhaps) a sign of 'the maturing author'?<br />
<br />
From ‘The Project of the Self under Late Capitalism’ <em>Australia’s Best Essays, 2001</em>.<br />
<blockquote>What are these new and emergent structures of feeling? This was something that first engaged me when I went to live in Sydney in 1987. . . . a new sensibility was developing that was a portent of how Australia generally might see the world ten or even twenty years from now. As for my Shiatsu practitioners, they differed from the mainstream only in degree not kind. In essence they were fierce materialists who, through a rigorous regimen of diet and physical training aspired to re-invent themselves by reconditioning their material base, the body – if necessary, cell by cell. They aspired to a kind of utopia of the body, and what could be more Australian than that? They were Zen surfers without the waves. (246-7)</blockquote><br />
<br />
<blockquote>Since then I’ve kept a watching brief on the evolution of the idea of the self as a constant work-in-progress and the concomitant growth of what might be described as privatised utopias; the utopia of one. . . . When all is free-floating, unstable, in a process of being dismantled or alienated from you [Z. Bauman’s liquid modernity], what is it you have left? And the answer is: the body. The body itself becomes a utopian site. And the project of the utopian body is primarily about the pragmatics of health, fitness and diets . . . ‘Fitter and healthier for what?’ (248-9)</blockquote>Michael Chttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03997773018535384710noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8244167267206207060.post-69385755760761014812011-06-26T20:44:00.001+10:002011-06-26T21:14:41.496+10:00the end(s) of certainty[An older post kept in storage but may as well let it out of the deep freeze].<br />
________________________________________________________<br />
<br />
I'm publishing a few posts from the last few years here which focus on the central place of Paul Kelly's 1992 <em>The End of Certainty</em> in any understanding of the long Labor Decade. Kelly's 'story of the 1980s', as his book was subtitled, acts as both the hegemonic means into thinking about this period (one of almost national-epic governmental change) and as itself a text of a considerable force through which the long decade becomes narrativised and thereby available for making meaning and legitimating political projects. In other words, my interest in this 'history' is dual: as a text through which to periodise; and as a text which performs a particular type of periodisation.<br />
<br />
The post immediately below is a relatively short one, and attempts to analyse the narrating position Kelly adopts at certain points in the narrative. From where and when can Kelly as narrator know, with an Olympian and magisterial certainty, that a critical political decision was pragmatic and yet inadequate to what the times demanded? The tentative answere here is that if we consider that Kelly is employing conventions from the <em>Bildungsroman</em>, we can use the extensive critical apparatus that has formed around discussion of this form to unpack how, and perhaps why, this narrating position is adopted. Indeed, Joseph Slaughter's notion of the <em>Bildungsroman</em> narrator employing a future-anterior form, or a tautological teleology, is very helpful in explaining how <em>The end of certainty </em>makes this key move. But why? Some answers proferred <a href="http://eurhythmania.blogspot.com/2008/02/narrativising-neoliberalism-australian.html">here</a>.<br />
<br />
_________________________________________________________<br />
<blockquote><br />
<span style="font-family: 'times new roman';">The ‘banana republic’ was a dose of shock therapy for the nation which for a while left a legacy of crisis which Labor could have utilised to impose far tougher policies on the nation. The opposition gave labor plenty of room. Howard called for a freeze of wages and public spending; the New Right was mugging unions from Robe River to Mudginberri. Keating’s authority was as potent as Hawke’s popularity. The prime minister declared the crisis the equivalent of war. The historical judgement in terms of the public mood and the depth of the problem is that the Hawke-Keating team failed to seize the full magnitude of the moment. Labor could have gone further but lacked the courage and imagination.<br />
<br />
Labor felt it was heroic enough – its decisions were draconian by orthodox standards and its advisers were pleased. Labor was also frightened by the demons of revolt from its base and a community backlash. Hawke and Keating depicted themselves as bold warriors. But history will record that the times demanded more and would have given more.<br />
<br />
Paul Kelly, <em>The End of Certainty</em>, 1992, p227.</span></blockquote><br />
<br />
To many Australian of my age (born in the 1960s), who were forming into adults in the 1980s, this quote from the end of a critical chapter in journalist Paul Kelly’s epic <em>bildungsroman</em> of the Australian Labor Party’s modernisation of the Australian economy, will trigger memories of a set of key events, narrative sequences and political <em>dramatis personae</em>. The ‘banana republic’ referred to here is a dystopian warning that treasurer Paul Keating dispatched, speaking on the phone to the king of talk-back radio in Australia at the time, John Laws, in 1986. Having instituted a ‘clean float’ of the Australian currency on the international exchange markets in late 1983, Australia’s integration into global finance markets now provided a moment by moment measurement of the nation’s economic performance and worth: the price of the $A. Combined with those stubbornly residual national accounts measures, which the Keynesian era had provided, such as the balance of trade, the current and capital accounts, foreign debt, Keating in 1986 judged the signs of national economic prospects to be quickly darkening. The storm warning transmitted on a nationally syndicated morning radio show in 1986, predicted landfall at Argentina if the ship of state wasn’t decisively and quickly steered away from that regressive land.<br />
<br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhCoSLvQ3NXo0cB6OCDIdh6ZMcHWueJkTQeopPcJ-z9IPIuhyX5B7Zo-os8A7fyUqIczinTxyrV3b3XzoWhRi_ea56oxIOd_1zYkvz9PtJHZVJSUb2zzwX24x4Bxw4npreEe5RaYN9-a_mD/s1600-h/200px-Velvet_Underground_and_Nico.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5186055172263043522" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhCoSLvQ3NXo0cB6OCDIdh6ZMcHWueJkTQeopPcJ-z9IPIuhyX5B7Zo-os8A7fyUqIczinTxyrV3b3XzoWhRi_ea56oxIOd_1zYkvz9PtJHZVJSUb2zzwX24x4Bxw4npreEe5RaYN9-a_mD/s400/200px-Velvet_Underground_and_Nico.jpg" style="cursor: hand; float: left; margin: 0px 10px 10px 0px;" /></a>The notion of a banana republic, a nation-state prone to military dictatorships and juntas, surviving, for the few, on precarious agricultural production, forever in debt to the developed world, was the dystopian destination coiled in the storm warning Keating employed to legitimate how and where the ship of state must now be steered: into rougher, but ultimately more prosperous, international waters. If Australia, and we are talking about Australia, was not to be a banana republic, what then was it to be?<br />
<br />
Kelly makes it clear that history itself found that the efforts made to steer away from this dystopia didn’t meet its demands. That, instead of ultimately averting the banana republic the possibility, unfortunately, lingers (in 1992).<br />
<br />
These are understandable yet odd claims made by Paul Kelly, who has become highly influential as a political commentator, working both in the production of extended historical narratives like <em>The end of certainty</em>, and more tightly as editor-at-large for Rupert Murdoch’s national broadsheet <em>The Australian</em>. It is understandable that Kelly would make such grand claims about a history which he knows in so much as his historiography is political in very specific ways. Kelly, in the passage cited above, is actually asserting that it is the times, anthropomorphised here as that ‘subject’ (collective or singular, we aren’t told) which made a demand which wasn’t fully supplied, or complied with.<br />
<br />
How can Kelly claim to know not only what History will record but what the times demanded? It’s instructive to turn back a few pages in this chapter to find the figure of this position from which such a judgement is made: it is the jury of the international markets – an anthropomorphised collective subjectivity that makes judgements like a judicial operative. That the markets are to be figured as subjective is one astonishing trope, but that a market (which is itself a moment in which the commodity form exists – that moment at which demand and supply come to terms and perform an exchange) is not an army, a general giving orders, a bureaucrat administering statutory regulations, but a jury is a key trope in what Kelly is performing in his political narrative (political both in subject and purpose). For to ascribe the clear, eye and ear of a jury to what the times demanded, and further, to what the times demanded as being that which history will record, is to suggest that the markets are a jury: comprised of regular, ordinary citizens, who will adjudge the evidence, and hear testimony and argument, who will be directed by judges, and who will reach either a majority or unanimous verdict. When Kelly writes that the times demanded more, he infers that the markets demanded more . . . that, indeed, what the ‘markets’ demanded was more deregulation (particularly of the labour market), less public spending. What was demanded was undersupplied – that is why History is able to record a deficit in political will and action; a surplus of Labourism’s sentimental traditionalism.<br />
<br />
Kelly’s narrative may seem reasonable from out perspective, after 10 years of neo-conservative governance: a neo-conservatism that has its own Australian aspects. But it might be useful to ask not only from <strong>where</strong> Kelly’s narrative/ historical writing voices its certainty (one of the unintentional ironies, surely, here is the paradox of an age of uncertainty, so certainly described and above all judged by history’s magisterial, almost moral, eyes and ears) but more importantly from <strong>when</strong> (in other words is there a type of temporal structure – a chronotope?). And here’s the clue: Kelly writes that ‘the times demanded more’. This is an odd anthropomorphism when analysed as a clause. However, the concept that distinct times make distinct demands, even at a national, or even international, level is a commonplace notion: it is a notion that forms a fundamental operation in political rhetoric, and it is also an emblem of a narrative genre: the coming of age genre – the <em>Bildungsroman</em>. For to meet the demands of the times, or of an age, is effectively to come of age – to become integrated into the age, and in so making this accommodation, to accept ‘reality’, or to develop realism.<br />
<br />
Kelly’s<em> bildungsroman</em> (of course, <em>The end of certainty</em>, is more than this) is classical in the two ways of the progenitor of the genre (Goethe’s <em>Wilhelm Meister’s apprenticeship</em>): the self forms a mature identity both through self integration and through integration with the world. In Kelly’s <em>Bildungsroman</em> Keating plays out the role of Wilhelm, but we are stuck in the transition phase, and Keating’s time at the helm is not yet secured. Kelly, perhaps, is speaking from the Tower Society, <em>The end of certainty </em>the book of Keating’s life – the instruction manual necessary to complete the formation. But alongside Keating is the nation itself – the body politic – which is to be reformed, modernised, to grow out of both its previous generation (the Menzies generation which is like the <em>ancien regime</em>: lethargic, rigidified, sclerotic, closed, old, no longer flexible and efficient, protean and creative, confident and outward looking), and also its youthful, adolescent phase (the Whitlam era: crazy mad, rushing, self-indulgent, experimental, idealist).<br />
<br />
As mentioned above Kelly can’t write a classical(and thereby closed) <em>Bildungsroman</em> as his central subjects – Keating & Australia – are still being re-formed/ developed, modernised. The economic realism, which Kelly has made his peace with, has formed him as an individual. His writing, his textuality, his rhetoric is a performance of his maturity – he has integrated politics with economics and found a realism from which to articulate the <em>zeitgeist</em> (the times) as that which the jury of the international markets had judged Australia’s political elite and found that its demands were not fully met! Writing in 1992 the nationl re-formation (the necessary breaking of the Australian settlement) is a becoming that has a telos, a set of destinations. These end points, as Meaghan Morris following Annie Cot argues, are utopian – endless economic growth, that doesn’t so much move towards filling, or closing, a lack, but rather creates and exacerbates the lack in the performance of a neo-conservative discourse. It is Grunge literature that captures some of this movement: rather than a <strong>dystopia</strong>, it is an <strong>atopia</strong> that emerges in the thematics of Australian grunge literature as that lack which neo-conservative discourse fuels. In grunge lit, rather than coming-of-age as individual subjects the transition from youth/ adolescence/ teenage to adulthood/ maturity is not only thwarted, it is instead refused, negated, caught in a feedback loop, stuck – the metamorphosis (itself a trope of re-generation) fails, becomes diseased and dies.<br />
<br />
A significant strand in Kelly’s historical narrative is the notion, itself a key convention of the <em>Bildungsroman</em>, that political leaders rise into executive power due to the mis/fit between some innate personality trait and the character of the times: that the mixture of contingent circumstances combined with the ‘philosophies’ of the party leaders and challengers, must also align with a personality that fits the times, the party, the mood, the necessities and the constituencies (including business, international forces etc). Another way to put this is to say that a successful stateswoman or statesman will have a biography that maps not only the personal traits 'called-out' by the times, but that they will be able to persuade a majority to alter with the times. It’s no surprise then that Meaghan Morris, in her essay 'Ecstasy and economics', considers theories of immantentism and the aestheticisation of politics, largely through reference to Kelly’s previous portraits of Keating in <em>The Hawke Ascendancy</em>.<br />
<br />
For what is subtextual in <em>The end of certainty</em> is the call of the times for a charismatic leader: a leader whose personality enables them to successfully lead (essentially to orchestrate a viable hegeharmonics, themselves), and whose individual formation has been tempered by a productive accommodation with global, post-Keynesian economic realism. Morris rejects Kelly's demand for a leader to suit the times, but not without first praising Kelly's skill in <em>mise en scene</em>, in religious allusion, and in portraiture. I add a skill in employing conventions in the <em>Bildungsroman</em>.Michael Chttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03997773018535384710noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8244167267206207060.post-54141822165515055782011-06-12T12:08:00.001+10:002011-06-12T12:23:47.670+10:00Marginaphilia and ebooks<div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">Simon Reynolds is my favourite writer on musical history. His <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Blissed Out</i> helped me make theoretical sense of late 80s and early 90s pop, hip hop and rock. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Rip it Up and Start Again</i>, a history of the post-punk movement, places Talking Heads next to Wire, The Fall side by side with Joy Division, providing a map of those social, political and aesthetic threads that made this movement so tantalizing, as well as introducing new music to seek out. So, when news came that Reynolds has a new book, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Retromania</i>, I went to Amazon to see if it was available in Kindle form. Yes, it was. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">A few months ago I would’ve bought a cheap Kindle version, immediately downloaded it to my Apple iPod touch or MacBook Pro laptop and read most of it. The surge in the $A has made Amazon books relatively cheap. And the velocity at which a book can be searched for, found, bought and downloaded to a reading device, produces a type of techno-rush that is addictive and sort of powerful. But within the last few months I’ve moved back to paper books. In fact, I’ve recently bought a number of Kindle ebooks via Amazon that I’ve read or even skimmed quickly once downloaded, which I’ve subsequently purchased in paper form. Did these ebooks become samplers or tasters; a cheaper, quicker, buzzier form that become the basis on which to decide to make the investment in the paper form? But ebooks are not tasters in the same way that a 45rpm vinyl single was a taster for a 33&1/3rpm lp. ebooks are not shorter in length than their non-digital versions. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">Maybe it’s the devices I’m reading on that have left me hankering for the paper version—I read with a pencil in hand, underlining, making annotations. The Mac Kindle software does make these writing/reading techniques available but, ironically, it’s quicker and more habitual for me to read with a pencil than to stop, highlight a passage, and type in a note. Reading paper with a pencil is a way of beginning to take notes; those proto-notes that, for me at least, begin to raise questions, make connections, and highlight significant and difficult passages—a widely used and well-worn technique. Others do this via writing in a reading journal. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">On the one hand these techniques for making meaning of what’s read by writing don’t necessarily require paper and pencils (or pens). Expert readers make mental notes and, as I’ve noted, ebooks can be annotated digitally. But marking the paper page is a form of writing-over and writing-back to the text that places the reader’s body, mediated by the lead pencil or ink pen, onto the page. This is not to say that highlighting a sentence in an e-book, then typing a comment, leaves no impression or mark, just that it is a disembodied, digital mark rather than an embodied, physical and analogue one. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">I like to mark and score the text: to evaluate, re-organise, illustrate, scratch and change it. At present I know how to do this with paper books and pencils, so that is why I’ve increasingly returned to paper books when I want to make a bodily investment in reading them. But with the growth in touch-screen tablet computers there must already be applications that allow such personalized marginalia to be written onto ebooks. When that happens—if it hasn’t already—ebooks will have become capable of an embodied and annotative, reading practice. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">In the meantime, I’ll be getting the paper version of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Retromania</i>.</span></div>Michael Chttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03997773018535384710noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8244167267206207060.post-65145541190015623962011-03-27T21:10:00.000+11:002011-03-27T21:10:34.258+11:00Unbinding spells: Malouf's romantic postcolonial existentialism, Pel Mel and PraiseEver fallen under the spell of a writer or a particular book?<br />
<br />
John Irving, author of <em>The World According to Garp</em> among other novels, talked about a moment in writing when the the universe of a novel fell under one tone of voice. When a single tonal register enclosed the world of the novel: its characters, events, places. Is this what happens when we are drawn into a story or <em>oeuvre</em> - we surrender to something like a gravitational pull, and stop resisting the story and storytelling and begin to feel our way into the emotional contours of the tale?<br />
<br />
Do we ever really begin to inhabit a story until sparks of identification and feeling make the jump from the page to our emotional and cognitive receptors? And once sparked, to put the question in its inverted form, what sorts of readings are those that rasp against the grain of the verbal wood or unrepress the traumas and loss that the text is a maze of dreamwork-like symptoms for? Do we need to first be spellbound before such literary-critical unbindings occur?<br />
<br />
Australian novelist, poet, essayist David Malouf did exert a spell over me for a period in the mid 1990s. Malouf's fictional prose often tumbles and flows through a mesmerizing tone of voice, that combines romantic awe with tenderness and a sly sense of humour. Malouf is also a canny plotter and seems to have ingested much of Heidegger's early existentialism and Edward Said's postcolonialism, giving his prose sustained passages of reflection where the narrator works through a problem or event with the timing and feel of the calmer, epiphanic instances of romantic poetry.<br />
<br />
Malouf's novels are often structured around an intense homosocial relationship and often involving an 'artist' who the narrator is close to yet ultimately distant from. These romantic artists are also postcolonial forerunners: their primary mode of being-in-the-world is forged out of a confrontation with the limits of colonial structures and discourses, and in such confrontation the creative imagination (what Cornelius Castoriadis calls the Radical Imagination) is enabled to break into newness or alterity. Frank Harland <em>(Harland's Half Acre</em>), Gemmy Fairlie <em>(Remembering Babylon</em>), the wild Child (<em>An Imaginary Life</em>) and <em>Johnno</em> are characters in Malouf's fictions that become post-colonial through their creative responses to encounters with the limits of colonial space and imperial presence. If, as Heidegger in <em>Being and Time</em> argues, authentic existence is a modification, rather than transcendence, of everyday being-with-others then the creative modifications of such colonial and nationalist social being in Malouf's fictions are postcolonial becomings that hover on the brink of transcendental idealism without ever becoming ungrounded.<br />
<br />
Exiled from Rome to the rural village of Tomas the poet Ovid, the narrrator of Malouf's second novel <em>An Imaginary Life</em>, tells us early in the narrative that:<br />
<br />
<blockquote><br />
[T]he spirits have to be recognised to become real. They are not quite outside us, nor even entirely within, but flow back and forth between us and the objects we have made, the landscape we have shaped and move in. We have dreamed all these things in our deepest lives and they are ourselves. It is our self we are making out there, and when the landscape is complete we shall become the gods who are intended for it. [28] </blockquote><br />
<br />
<br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhUIA7ZcD-w5JOMNsthDCpBIaBATFL4HZPLn9wXHoPT5RtDP0jKHYvNePC8V1ztQBr-XWpWPVlJEIfVT3f5GezhwcwnghI75QTB4oCh63AavIdx1IhsosqBEKKsDe0XeBhzfJFmZHJ_H1Z5/s1600-h/imaginarylife.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5201674928492515474" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhUIA7ZcD-w5JOMNsthDCpBIaBATFL4HZPLn9wXHoPT5RtDP0jKHYvNePC8V1ztQBr-XWpWPVlJEIfVT3f5GezhwcwnghI75QTB4oCh63AavIdx1IhsosqBEKKsDe0XeBhzfJFmZHJ_H1Z5/s320/imaginarylife.jpg" style="cursor: hand; cursor: pointer; display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" /></a><br />
<br />
Yet later in the novel, after Ovid has worked through the mourning of his lost father and had the existential encounter with his own mortality (being-toward-death), such Romantic idealism enters a dialectic with a returned gaze of a Native child - the wild wolf-like Child of the village:<br />
<br />
<blockquote><br />
What I remember clearly now are his eyes, fixed on me across the open space between the trees, that stare is something I could not have imagined. I have seen nothing like it before, except from the eyes of my child, so many years ago . . . <strong>It exceeds my imagining</strong>, that sharp little face with its black stare, and I think how poorly my poetry . . . compares with the accidental reality of this creature who must exist not to impress but simply because he has somehow tumbled into being. [50 - emphasis added]</blockquote><br />
<br />
<br />
In <em>Remembering Babylon</em> [1993] a character's authentic existential experience is also dialectically entwined with the ethics of the Other - the Other for whom the self's recognition (and vice versa) establishes identity:<br />
<br />
<blockquote><br />
[H]er regard was upon him . . .trying to see right into him, to catch his spirit, aware, as the others were not, that he was not entirely what he allowed them to see . . .her gaze was so open and vulnerable that he felt no threat in it, and in himself only a stillness, a sense of tender ease at being exposed for a moment - not to her, but to himself . . . he felt in the concentration of her gaze that he hung there still. Something, in that moment, had been settled between them . . . he went back and back to it. [35-6]</blockquote><br />
<br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgnZrUiJHM46it9cTEkhE7MHcRv_KM7dhM4g0RnW93RPqU1546EhryY94V46V431CW9lp9u-iok78_Zf6NDLden_KW4jZljq-LwVHFchLwf17Czx7pwjG7r4_EKYtNUZfvu5H-7767l-dTb/s1600-h/rememberingbabylon.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5201674932787482786" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgnZrUiJHM46it9cTEkhE7MHcRv_KM7dhM4g0RnW93RPqU1546EhryY94V46V431CW9lp9u-iok78_Zf6NDLden_KW4jZljq-LwVHFchLwf17Czx7pwjG7r4_EKYtNUZfvu5H-7767l-dTb/s320/rememberingbabylon.jpg" style="cursor: hand; cursor: pointer; display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" /></a><br />
In the scene above the putatively indigenized Gemmy Fairlie (Malouf's portrayal of the white indigene as hybrid racial-cultural subject), gives presence to a totality of possibilities for postcolonial inhabitance through the reflection returned to Janet McIvor's open gaze:<br />
<br />
<blockquote><br />
'I have never seen anyone clearer in all my life. All that he was. All.' Something Gemmy had touched off in them [Janet and her brother Lachlan] was what they were still living, both, in their different ways . . .[and] in a stilled moment that had lasted for years, Gemmy as she saw him, once and for all, up there on the stripped and shiny rail, never to fall . . .drawn by the power, all unconscious in them, of their gaze, their need to draw him into their lives - love, again, love - overbalanced but not yet falling. [195-9]</blockquote><br />
<br />
<br />
I do still find both the expression and the ideas spellbinding: the possibilities of the imagination working with presence and Others to enable a deeper dwelling, and the simple, precise and elegant language, that tumbles clauses together in a conversational tone. The Free and Radical Imagination and the radical social imaginary are tempting dreams to believe in, as sources of postcoloniality, justice and liberation. But the social imaginary doesn't behave in the same way as the creative-productive imagination: the power of institutions, of discourses, of the production and distribution of commodities, of the turning of people into waste products, the power of capital to shape and form the social imaginaries that most people live within.<br />
<br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj6iXqDGMfamdJER2P4fx8hY_SFVkXGwLwATwBGJCZobsQmeX9lElLPd7HdaDJPBYKz9u68dYNHDm2Y-BZmANaTZH-WDgvKkfFyrlnZ5y8O6Rs_ZnnLV3oxl0yNizXRDXyAWyI0wqzHLmZV/s1600-h/PEL-MEL-NoWord2a200.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5201682453275218098" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj6iXqDGMfamdJER2P4fx8hY_SFVkXGwLwATwBGJCZobsQmeX9lElLPd7HdaDJPBYKz9u68dYNHDm2Y-BZmANaTZH-WDgvKkfFyrlnZ5y8O6Rs_ZnnLV3oxl0yNizXRDXyAWyI0wqzHLmZV/s320/PEL-MEL-NoWord2a200.jpg" style="cursor: hand; cursor: pointer; float: left; margin: 0 10px 10px 0;" /></a>Reading Malouf's fiction as postcolonial Romantic existentialism finds its limits when you start looking to historicise the period from which he begins to produce prose: 1975 to the present. From someone of my generation 1975 is the year punk rock starts to emerge, and this musical-cultural form was short, sharp and rooted in negation and Warlholian aesthetics. So, while Malouf's seductive prose and ethical-aesthetic project retains its power to spell me, I feel like I'm being gravitationally pulled into a history that doesn't square with being shaken by experiencing Newcastle's post-punk band Pel Mel at the MacQuarie Uni Bar in 1983 and feeling as though that was where life was. And it wasn't until Andrew McGahan's <em>Praise </em>(1992) that something of what Pel Mel were doing - a shared structure of feeling - came into Australian fiction, for me at least, with the tone of voice of <em>Praise</em>'s Gordon Buchanan:<br />
<br />
<br />
<blockquote><br />
I'd always maintained a certain distance from the staff at the Capital. I liked them, I drank with them, but I didn't get involved. There were only a few, Carla and Morris, and maybe Lisa, that I bothered with outside of work hours. Most of my friends came from other parts of my life. From school. University. Most of the sex came from there too, but there wasn't much sex and what there was hadn't been much good. I was young and nervous and not very enthusiastic. I didn't have the libido I felt I was supposed to have. And I didn't expect things to improve. I relied on masturbation.</blockquote><br />
<br />
<em>Praise</em> [7].<br />
<br />
[Pel Mel - <em>No word from China</em> You tube <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KofUP7jPkMc">link</a>]Michael Chttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03997773018535384710noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8244167267206207060.post-26797863245263455682011-01-06T11:19:00.000+11:002011-01-06T11:19:25.081+11:00The uses of FB literacy<div style="-webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 5px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 5px; color: black; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, Arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 11px; font-weight: normal; line-height: 18px; text-decoration: none;">I'm ambivalent about Facebook. I tend to lurk there, occasionally posting You Tube clips, but mostly checking in on friends and acquaintances, feeling as though I'm part of a network. My ambivalence springs, in part, from being uncomfortable with the genres of writing it seems to demand: the additive comment, the quick witted rejoinder, the enthusiastic affirmation, the self-display update.<br />
<br />
As a teacher of young adult literacy, one of the complaints I hear about FB is that it is a time-wasting distraction, taking teens away from education, real life. I wonder, though, if there are opportunities in the engagement these young adults have in FB for literacy learning. Because it values script above oral communication, FB surely offers opportunities for literacy growth as young people are generally more accomplished in the oral genres: in order to grow a FB network, teens need to write in ways that form and build relationships. A problem, however, is that the appearance of a 'teacher' figure--who might act as means for such improvements--within a FB teenage social network, would bend the network out of shape. But what if there is no teacher/ mentor figure? What if one of the achievements of FB is to open spaces in which such hierarchies are flatter? </div><div style="-webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 5px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 5px; color: black; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, Arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 11px; font-weight: normal; line-height: 18px; text-decoration: none;"><br />
</div><div style="-webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 5px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 5px; color: black; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, Arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 11px; font-weight: normal; line-height: 18px; text-decoration: none;">If there are uses for literacy improvement within FB that go beyond promoting programs and courses, these are perhaps to be found in the less direct, catalytic effects achieved by working on building social trust across multiple networks. In other words, FB opens up multiple social networks that individuals can engage in. But these networks crosshatch with others. It is, then, the capacities and skills to move between networks that might well be more important (in governing the self and in participating in the government of others) than building symbolic capital (in Bourdieu's sense--the cachet that one's name has) in one network. Indeed, such capacities to move between networks could be seen as a new type of symbolic capital. </div><div style="-webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 5px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 5px; color: black; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, Arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 11px; font-weight: normal; line-height: 18px; text-decoration: none;"><br />
</div><div style="-webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 5px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 5px; color: black; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, Arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 11px; font-weight: normal; line-height: 18px; text-decoration: none;">These concerns go to the concept and practice of translation: moving between networks, fields, and situations in ways that the knowledge, skills and self-belief practiced and invested in one activity, in one social network, can be drawn on in another. For example, it took me a while to accept the idea that teaching a class was a performance and not a manifestation of innate responses to a curriculum-based situation. Having performed live music over a number of years, I began to translate the techniques of preparing for and performing a gig to the tutorial situation: rehearsal, learning the pieces, improvising, recording rehearsals, having a set list, timing, keep going, playing as though it was the first time, using adrenaline . . . There are other practices involved in tutoring that gigging can't prepare you for, but having translated these key performance techniques helped to generate belief in my own capacities. I was able to move between networks, or fields, through these gateway techniques that were learnt initially in a domain that I was enthusiastic about; driven to participate in. </div><div style="-webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 5px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 5px; color: black; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, Arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 11px; font-weight: normal; line-height: 18px; text-decoration: none;"><br />
</div><div style="-webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 5px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 5px; color: black; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, Arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 11px; font-weight: normal; line-height: 18px; text-decoration: none;">The sorts of enthusiasms that circulate through FB require computer and social techniques and knowledge that complaints (or grizzling--see below) about the uselessness of FB ignore. The drive to be-friend and grow one's network generates opportunities for literacy growth that, however seemingly 'useless', can be translated into other networks, fields and situations. Providing we recognise what literacies are already happening.<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">*</div><br />
Complaints about the uselessness or even malign influence of FB are part of what Meaghan Morris argues is <a href="http://www.australianhumanitiesreview.org/archive/Issue-November-2009/morris.html">'Grizzling about Facebook'.</a> Morris finds that such grizzling, as can be found in the Murdoch press, for example, is an old genre in which technological innovation is held to be an attack on traditional or everyday life. Thus the trope, in FB grizzling, of its valorising of inauthentic friendships and facile communications in contrast to the authentic sincere relationships that old media, like telephones, letter writing supposedly enable:<br />
<br />
<blockquote>‘Facebook no substitute for real world contact' is a grizzle in this sense. What on earth is supposed to follow from a declaration like that? If parents are being incited to pull the plug on their children, or to seize their mobile phones, will millions of adults also rush off-line to chat in a neighbouring office or across the back fence? What would happen in the ‘real world' of our working lives if we did so?</blockquote></div><div style="-webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 5px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 5px; color: black; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, Arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 11px; font-weight: normal; line-height: 18px; text-decoration: none;"><br />
</div><div style="-webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 5px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 5px; color: black; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, Arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 11px; font-weight: normal; line-height: 18px; text-decoration: none;">Against FB grizzling, Morris mounts a defence of the utopian possibilities of it and other social media. Indeed, what I find most interesting in her argument, is that she sees FB's best attribute as its capacity to combine genres of sociality. It is perhaps in this combinant facility that FB encourages translation as a skill, making it a tool for literacy learning.<br />
<br />
<blockquote>Let me offer my own two or three cents about utopia and Facebook. First, Facebook is not all quizzes, ‘hey babes' and pokes. Most negative media stories obsess about one or two features (photos and status updates in particular), but the point about Facebook is that it bundles together multiple functions and potential things to do. Most of us never use all of them, and other social networking platforms do some of these things better than Facebook does (MySpace for new music, Live Journal for communities, Ning for interest groups, Twitter for global converse and news as-it-happens …), but what Facebook does well is combine: you can write private letters, play games, send gifts, do quizzes, circulate news, post notes, music and clips, share photos or research, test your knowledge, join groups and causes, make haiku-like allusions to your state of mind and chat on-line with friends, all in one place and time—restoring or relieving, according to need, the pattern of an everyday life. Facebook is on-line culture ‘lite': this makes it an object of scorn for digital elitists and ‘white noise' haters (see Tuttle), but it is also a source of its mainstream appeal. Corresponding to this variety of uses is the diversity of kinds of contact Facebook allows, with the relation between ‘contact' and intimacy also having the potential to vary over time within each singular friendship. In this respect it follows the rhythms of ‘real life' as a whole: as Lauren Berlant puts it, ‘all kinds of emotional dependency and sustenance can flourish amongst people who only meet each other at one or a few points on the grid of the field of their life' (‘Faceless Book').</blockquote></div><div style="-webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 5px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 5px; color: black; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, Arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 11px; font-weight: normal; line-height: 18px; text-decoration: none;"><blockquote><br />
</blockquote></div><div style="-webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 5px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 5px; color: black; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, Arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 11px; font-weight: normal; line-height: 18px; text-decoration: none;"><blockquote>Nothing flourishes for people who join Facebook and do nothing with it; passive or un-giving use of any network is rewarded in kind (Strohmeyer). As Thompson points out, a depth dimension to ‘ambient awareness' accumulates only with time and aggregation. It does grow over time; Facebook has increased my affective quality of life, and not only because it offers a break from my academic service work. The collective stream of posts brings me word of books, articles, music, films, video clips and news that I would otherwise never discover. At a time of life when new involvements become more rare, I suddenly have digital penfriends with whom I exchange old-fashioned letters through Inbox (one of the least remarked features of Facebook), while an acquaintance from decades ago has become a dear friend whom I contact almost daily. Retrieving a joy of my childhood, when my father would bring home a ‘two bob' chocolate on a Friday night and we'd listen to The Goon Show and My Word on the ABC, I play variants of Scrabble with friends on four continents throughout the day. Facebook also nudges me to remember more of my past than I am wont to do, as other people's actions unpredictably pull bits of our scattered lives together. There is more to this aspect than the nostalgia decried by Susan Dominus (‘sometimes it seems like Facebook is the most back-ward looking innovation ever expected to change the future') and Steve Tuttle (‘Goodbye, William and Mary alums I barely remember from 25 years ago'). Facebook has utopian force for me because it gently undoes the dissociative patterns I learned as a girl in pugnaciously ‘real' Australian country towns; it lets me have family on the same plane as my ex-students, my friends who talk books, my colleagues in Hong Kong and Australia and friends who also post in Italian, French and Chinese. Directly because of Facebook, I was able to speak by phone to a much-loved cousin just before he died. If Facebook vanished overnight, I would experience grief.</blockquote></div>Michael Chttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03997773018535384710noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8244167267206207060.post-57157346768558097752010-12-23T15:47:00.000+11:002010-12-23T15:47:53.998+11:00on MeanlandA summary of the articles and discussions at Overland's site about the <a href="http://web.overland.org.au/2010/12/21/the-world-according-to-meanland-the-top-ten-things-we-covered-this-year-in-no-particular-order/">Meanland project</a>: Reading in a time of change.Michael Chttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03997773018535384710noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8244167267206207060.post-45265795742537341742010-11-27T19:26:00.007+11:002010-11-28T10:54:16.921+11:00Literary politics in the Anthropocene<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.ianmcewan.com/bib/books/images/Solar_2331.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://www.ianmcewan.com/bib/books/images/Solar_2331.jpg" width="207" /></a></div><div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm; mso-add-space: auto;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Palatino;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm; mso-add-space: auto;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Palatino;">Below is a fairly unaltered copy of a paper presented mid-year at the <a href="http://www.aal.asn.au/">Australasian Association for Literature</a>'s 'Literature and Science' conference. Seeing Ian McEwan's <i>Solar </i>in a bookstore window, recently, reminds me of this paper and one of its central purposes: to place <i>Solar </i>against <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_McGahan">Andrew McGahan</a>'s much more interesting novel about the connections between climate, libido, madness, magic realism and sublime geological experience. </span></div><div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 6pt; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm; text-align: center;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Palatino;">*</span></div><div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 6pt; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm; text-align: center;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Palatino;"><b>Can we understand the geological sublime? Ian McEwan's </b><i><b>Solar </b></i><b>and Andrew McGahan's </b><i><b>Wonders of a Godless World</b></i><b>.</b></span></div><div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm; mso-add-space: auto;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Palatino;">A quick precis before offering the detail of this paper. Firstly, I’ll outline historian Dipesh Chakrabarty’s recent essay on the challenges to historical practice posed by anthropogenic global warming, and focus in particular on his argument that placing human species history in conversation with histories of capital—a conversation or dialogue that he claims is necessitated by climate change—is an exercise in probing the limits of historical understanding. In the second part, I’ll draw on one of the central arguments in Paul Ricoeur’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Time and Narrative</i>: which is that whether in fictional or historical form, narrative can work with, and on, the aporia produced by thinking cosmological and phenomenological time together. The hypothesis that is built out of the first two parts of the paper is that fiction’s capacity to refigure time provides distinctive resources in pushing the limits of understanding. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm; mso-add-space: auto;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Palatino;">The third and final parts test this hypothesis against two recent novels that take climate change as a central subject: Ian McEwan’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Solar</i> and Andrew McGahan’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Wonders of a Godless World</i>. Finally, running through these last two parts will be my claim that in spite of it not being explicitly concerned with anthropogenic global warming, McGahan’s novel more successfully addresses itself to the ways that fiction can partake in the politics of climate change because its key characters are intimate with geological time and have degrees of geological agency. Effectively, they have understandings of dimensions of geological time and space that might usually be experienced as sublime.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm; mso-add-space: auto;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm; mso-add-space: auto;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Palatino;">1. Dipesh Chakrabarty’s Climate of History.</span></b></div><div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm; mso-add-space: auto;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Palatino;"><br />
</span></b></div><div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm; mso-add-space: auto;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Palatino;">Chakrabarty’s essay <a href="http://www.stanford.edu/~jonallan/Chakrabarty.pdf">“The Climate of History: Four Theses”</a> is a series of cumulative arguments which set out the ramifications of climate change for human histories. I’ll quickly outline the first three theses, before unpacking the fourth a little more. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 6pt; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm; text-align: center;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Palatino;">Thesis 1: Anthropogenic explanations of climate change spell the collapse between the Age-old distinction between natural and human history.<o:p></o:p></span></b></div><div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm; mso-add-space: auto;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Palatino;">Chakrabarty argues once you accept anthropogenic global warming, or other human-induced causes for climate and geological change, then the human history/natural history dichotomy collapses due to human species being considered geological agents: a force of nature in the geological sense akin to those events when there has been mass extinctions of species. So, rather than nature being portrayed as the unchanging, seasonally cyclic backdrop to the theatre of political or social history, these backdrops have come to life and must be presented as more dynamic and enmeshed in human history than before. The inverse is also true: that natural histories that cover the last 250 years need to take our geological agency as a species into account.</span></div><div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 6pt; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm; text-align: center;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Palatino;">Thesis 2: The idea of the Anthropocene, the new geological Epoch when humans exist as a geological force, severely qualifies humanist histories of modernity/ globalization</span></b><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Palatino;">.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm; mso-add-space: auto;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Palatino;">For Chakrabarty humanist histories of modernity and globalization place freedom at their centre. The story of the last 250 years of human civilization is, he claims, thematically centred on the development and spread of freedom. Yet, the last 250 years has also been <a href="http://ma.researcharchitecture.net/node/369">periodized as the new geological epoch of the Anthropocene</a>. The previous epoch of the Holocene, stretching back around 10 to 12, 000 years, provided a rise in temperature conducive to agrarian civilization. But since the onset of the industrial revolution, the affect on the earth of fossil fuel use has shifted it into a new set of conditions in which human species are geologically potent. To place geological and human time scales together like this is quite unsettling, and one implication of this polyrhythm is we are led to conclude that, to quote Chakrabarty, “The mansion of modern freedom stands on an ever-expanding base of fossil fuel use.”</span></div><div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 6pt; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm; text-align: center;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Palatino;">Thesis 3: The geological hypothesis regarding the Anthropocene requires us to put global histories of capital in conversation with the species history of humans. <o:p></o:p></span></b></div><div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm; mso-add-space: auto;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Palatino;">The argument here is that it is at the level of species, and not nations, for example, that humans have become geological agents in the last 250 years. This argument, however, is not compatible with global histories of capital in which uneven development and intra and inter-national inequality mean that the benefits of industrialization have not been enjoyed in a just manner. Similarly, within recent histories of globalization the problems posed by climate change are a matter of a crisis in capitalist management. Chakrabarty poses the question “If capitalism were to mutate beyond its current forms or even to end, would climate change still pose a problem?” His answer is that it would and it does because there are certain boundary or parameter conditions, such as temperature bands, which once crossed spell the end of the species, whether our dominant system is capitalism or not. We therefore can’t subsume species history of humans to histories of global capital but instead need to place them in dialogue.</span></div><div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm; mso-add-space: auto;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Palatino;">We are now at the fourth and crucial thesis, which is</span><br />
<div style="text-align: center;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Palatino;"></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: normal;"><b></b></span></div><b></b><br />
<b></b><br />
<b></b><br />
<b></b><br />
<b><div class="MsoListParagraph" style="display: inline !important; line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 6pt; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm;"><div style="display: inline !important;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Palatino;">Thesis 4: The cross-hatching of species history and the history of capital is a process of probing the limits of historical understanding.</span></b></div></div></b></div><blockquote></blockquote><div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm; mso-add-space: auto;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Palatino;">This cross-hatching or conversation between species history and history of capital throws up the enormous problem of historical understanding. Chakrabarty is using understanding here in a technical sense, derived from the <a href="http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/gadamer/">hermeneutic tradition</a>, where the primary technique of interpretation in human sciences, like history, is the practice of re-imagining or re-enacting the life experience of others based on your own life. Humanist history is also based in the technique of explanation—a technique it shares with the natural sciences. But the argument here is that while we can give <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">explanations</i> for what caused, say, the depression of the 1930s, and while we can <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">understand</i> what it might have been like to have lived through those times—explanations and understandings that are available to us in histories of capital—we can offer only explanations for how human species are and have become geological agents. The reason we cannot understand ourselves as human species is because we can never <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">experience</i> ourselves as a species. Chakrabarty: “Even is we were to emotionally identify with a word like mankind, we would not know what being a species is, for, in species history, humans are only an instance of the concept species as indeed would be any other life form. But one never experiences being a concept.” As he also puts it: “ There can be no phenomenology of us as a species.” <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm; mso-add-space: auto;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm; mso-add-space: auto;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Palatino;"><b>2. <i>Time and Narrative</i></b></span></div><div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm; mso-add-space: auto;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Palatino;"><b><i><br />
</i></b></span></div><div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm; mso-add-space: auto;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Palatino;">The problem Chakrabarty develops is dealt with on a more general level in Paul Ricoeur’s <i><a href="http://www.iep.utm.edu/ricoeur/#H5">Time and Narrative</a></i>. Ricoeur wants to know, alongside other questions, if we can reconcile our lived or phenomenological experience of time with what can be called, objective, cosmological, or universal time. These two forms of time map fairly neatly onto the problem that Chakrabarty puts his finger on: namely, how can we reconcile phenomenological time—the time of understanding—with human species and geological time—the time made available through quantification and explanation? Ricoeur’s response is that narrative can figure time in ways that enable degrees of understanding and explanation, which help us to bridge these two poles of time. Ricoeur makes a series of distinctions between historical and fictive time, two of which will help make the transition in my argument here toward its discussion of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Solar</i> and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Wonders of a Godless World</i>. Unlike narrative historical time, fictive time removes a set of constraints on the narrator who as historian needs to re-inscribe lived time onto cosmic time through reference to such temporalizations of time as calendars, generations, and archival traces. Secondly, and related to the first point, fiction can explore new figurations of lived time that can be related to cosmological time in new ways. Freed from some of the constraints of historical time, fiction can, perhaps, assist us to imaginatively understand what a conversation between human species history and a history of capital can be, or to understand what the geological agency of human species might be like to experience. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm; mso-add-space: auto;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Palatino;">So, the hypothesis built here out of the first two parts of the paper is that fiction’s capacity to refigure time provides distinct resources in probing the limits of understanding. I now turn to the third and fourth parts of the paper, which will test this hypothesis.</span></div><div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm; mso-add-space: auto;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Palatino;"> </span></div><div class="Style1"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span lang="EN-US"><br />
</span></b><br />
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span lang="EN-US">3. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Solar</i> <o:p></o:p></span></b></div><div class="Style1"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Palatino; line-height: 24px;"><br />
</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Palatino; line-height: 24px;">Ian McEwan’s </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Palatino; line-height: 24px;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Solar</i></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Palatino; line-height: 24px;">, published earlier this year, takes climate change, its politics and economics, as its central topic and focus for a comic satire. Its central literary techniques are narratorial irony and synecdoche, in particular the fleshing out of the central character—Noble prize winning physicist, Michael Beard—as a despicably, all-too-human assemblage of sins and flaws which is</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Palatino; line-height: 24px;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> part</i></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Palatino; line-height: 24px;"> of a </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Palatino; line-height: 24px;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">whole</i></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Palatino; line-height: 24px;"> humanity unsuited to the altruism called out by the challenges of climate change. His is a part of the glutton-ness, slothful, proud, lustful, greedy, wrathful and envious whole. A whole beholden to Neoliberal capitalism with little altruism to recommend it. McEwan’s narrator focalizes the narration through Beard and his numerous adventures, varying the level of irony to achieve satiric effects, and to oscillate between a distancing and drawing close to Beard who we are invited to both despise and empathize with. This oscillation in narratorial distance combined with its satirical aims, make </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Palatino; line-height: 24px;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Solar </i></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Palatino; line-height: 24px;">a realist comic apocalypse novel. Again, the apocalyptic allegory runs through Beard, whose appetites—one too many sandwiches or packets of chips, one too many sexual affairs—are speeding up his own end, which we are encouraged to think of as an allegory of the end of the species. His appetites are, however, not tragic but comic flaws, for in spite of his sinfulness, he has some redeeming attributes, and is himself sometimes victim to the sinful drives of others.</span></div><div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm; mso-add-space: auto;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Palatino;"></span><br />
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Palatino;"></span><br />
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Palatino;"></span><br />
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Palatino;"></span><br />
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Palatino;"><div class="Style1"><span lang="EN-US"><br />
</span></div><div class="Style1"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-US">Solar</span></i><span lang="EN-US">’s presentation of technological innovation, biophysics research, institutional (bureaucratic, academic, state) politics, and capitalist entrepreneurialism, provide both the novel’s targets for satire and its pathway through to a more redemptive and hopeful opening, emblematized in the central character, Beard’s, ambivalent ‘final’ feeling: an intensely strong emotion, which is either a last heart attack/stroke, or his paternal love for his young daughter, whose long future, his efforts—almost as a by product of his drives/sinfulness—in the field of photosynthetic energy production, might well ensure. </span></div><div class="Style1"><span lang="EN-US"><br />
</span></div><div class="Style1"><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times;"><i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Palatino;">Solar</span></i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Palatino;"> has been received and marketed within the framework of the politics of climate change. <a href="http://www.abc.net.au/lateline/content/2010/s2847828.htm">McEwan appeared on ABC’s Lateline</a> commenting on the Copenhagen Conference, for example. But how, if at all, does it refigure time? Does it help us to understand the sublime dimensions of a geological time that is now affected by human species activity?</span></span></span></div></span></div><div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm; mso-add-space: auto;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Palatino;">Solar </span></i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Palatino;">offers one figuration of time with which to develop an understanding of the relationship between human species time and geological time. This scene comes at the start of part 2 as Beard’s plane prepares to land at London, in 2005. As it descends, Beard has a geographically wide-angled and longue duree vision of the city and its surrounds which juxtaposes key events, relationships, places and concerns in his life with the rise of industrialization and modernization. “The hot breath of civilization. He felt it, everyone was feeling it, on the neck, in the face. Beard, gazing down from his wondrous and wonderfully dirty machine believed in his better moments that he had the answer to the problem. At last, he had a mission, it was consuming him, and he was running out of time. “ (Kindle version location. 1756-63). The central metaphor in this scene is his own apartment, which is full of spore-infested food and unwashed dishes. This trope becomes an emblem in the final passage of this section, when he wonders “how could we ever begin to restrain ourselves? We appeared, at this height, like a spreading lichen, a ravaging bloom of algae, a mould enveloping a soft fruit – we were such a wild success. Up there with the spores!” (loc. 1833-47). Human species spreading over the rocks as lichen. It’s a nice image but not one that really opens up a way of understanding geological agency in the Anthropocene.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpLast" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm; mso-add-space: auto;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Palatino;">Solar</span></i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Palatino;"> doesn’t really help us to understand what living in the Anthropocene means, except that human species, in spite of ourselves, might have a future by virtue of a liberal techno-scientific-capitalism that we hope will function to produce new energy sources. The logics of physics and the market seem to lie outside this comically corrupted human species, and these are, it seems, what we might best place our faith in. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Solar</i>’s <a href="http://books.google.com.au/books?id=IDYOyWC6kIoC&pg=PA106&lpg=PA106&dq=comic+apocalyptic+ecocriticism&source=bl&ots=vGjWrvHkFg&sig=R4HwprDWII-kG5zyFecdR_XLsXA&hl=en&ei=hsLwTNaSEMGeceLcsboK&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&sqi=2&ved=0CBgQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q&f=false">comic apocalyptic mode</a>, avoids the fatalism, even biocentrism, of some ecological discourse, and provides a more pluralistic and provisional set of openings to the problems of the Anthropocene than a novel written with the conventions of a <a href="http://books.google.com.au/books?id=oQ41exMvPCUC&pg=PA99&dq=tragic+apocalypse+ecocriticism&hl=en&ei=7sLwTKIGgrC-A4qmweQN&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CCUQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q&f=false">tragic apocalypse</a>. But unless you can stretch the allegory so far as to see Beard’s body as an emblem of the geological body of the earth, I don’t see how <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Solar</i> can be read within the problematic that Chakrabarty draws attention to.</span><br />
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Palatino;"> </span><br />
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Palatino;"></span><br />
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Palatino;"></span><br />
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Palatino;"></span><br />
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Palatino;"></span><br />
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Palatino;"></span><br />
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Palatino;"></span><br />
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Palatino;"></span><br />
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Palatino;"><div class="Style1"><span lang="EN-US"><b>4. <i>Wonders</i></b></span></div><div class="Style1">Andrew McGahan’s 2009 novel <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Wonders of a Godless World</i>—which will be shortened to <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Wonders</i>—is oriented around the relationship between madness, geological human agency, and geological phenomena. There are very few comic moments in this mix of science fiction and magic realism, and it treads a more tragic apocalyptic generic terrain than <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Solar</i>. Its central literary techniques are the use of alternating third and second person narrative voices, which are crucial in how the novel’s characters become able to experience and communicate <a href="http://books.google.com.au/books?id=sHJD0ufuavUC&pg=PA12&lpg=PA12&dq=Kant+geological+sublime&source=bl&ots=gWeExNp2Bw&sig=vBMUHcccEEoCzty7sij8Ed29kQs&hl=en&ei=qYHxTOGFIpHwvwO1_bzwDQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=2&ved=0CB0Q6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q=Kant%20geological%20sublime&f=false">sublime dimensions of geological phenomena</a> and time. </div><div class="Style1"><span lang="EN-US"><br />
</span></div><div class="Style1"><span lang="EN-US">The plot involves a young woman known as the orphan, who is on the cusp of coming-of-age and who works in an unnamed island hospital with a range of mentally ill patients. A mysterious, almost constantly unconscious figure enters the hospital and her life—the Foreigner. The mythically titled characters extend to Four other inmates, all suffering from different forms of trauma-based madness, are given similarly mythic or archetypal names: the Duke, the Witch, the Archangel and the Virgin. The reason for these mythic and even fairytale-type names is that the orphan is almost completely aphasic: unable to express or understand speech and text. She has some linguistic facility, but cannot remember names. The third person narration of the novel is, somewhat magically focalized through her subjectivity, her thoughts. And here is where the plot develops, for the Foreigner, it transpires, can make himself understood to her and understand her through a type of psychic communication, which he performs in the second person narration of the novel. The Orphan’s possible madness becomes an undecidable question in the novel: is she hallucinating the dialogue with the Foreigner, who lies unconscious for much of the time of the novel, or is he engaged in a type of education for her which is a cover for a more menacing project? </span></div><div class="Style1"><span lang="EN-US"><br />
</span></div><div class="Style1"><span lang="EN-US">The plot thickens when volcanic activity near the hospital is experienced by the orphan as a range of vibrations and felt forces, which she has the capacity to read in ways that are precise and predictive. If her linguistic aphasia is a form of madness, then this madness might be due to her astonishing geological literacy. The Foreigner is quick to detect these skills and begins his seduction of her, which includes a type of biospheric travel, where he and the Orphan leave their bodies, and travel together as shadow selves or ghost bodies to the freak climate and geological events that have caused him to die and be reborn 4 times. In this string of 5 lives, the foreigner lives each life, motivated by his drive to either avenge or transcend his initial rejection by the earth, in a particular manner—as a rapacious mining venture capitalist, as a Gaia-worshipping conservationist, as a New Age transcendental Guru and solitary island dweller, and as an astronaut. In both these travels and in the stories the Foreigner re-enacts for the Orphan, we see phases in the history of capital, and see them start to act as geological agents. Indeed, the plot trajectory of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Wonders</i> is toward the Foreigner stoking then violently taking over the Orphan’s latent powers of geological telekinesis to enact his revenge on a malign earth, </span></div><div class="Style1"><span lang="EN-US"><br />
</span></div><blockquote>an immensely powerful beast. I saw the hard, carved faces carved faces of the continents, and the inexorable currents of the oceans flowing. I felt the atmosphere humming with electricity, and the inside of the planet bursting with suppressed heat. I sensed what a savage thing the world really is—strong, hot and driven by systems so vast that they dwarf mankind and all his works to nullity. (237)</blockquote><div class="Style1"><span lang="EN-US"><br />
</span></div><div class="Style1"><span lang="EN-US">In the final scenes of the novel, geological agency is embodied in these characters. Back in third person narration the Orphan attempts to act on the local volcano’s magma to assist in her benign scheme to thwart the Foreigner’s plot, by accessing</span></div><blockquote>the aura of life enfolding the whole planet. So it wasn’t a matter of squeezing the power from herself, it was a matter of shaping her mind into a conduit through which the energy could pass—and then of inviting the power to flow from the planet’s vast supply.</blockquote><blockquote>The orphan took a deep breath, considered the magma once more. Then she breathed out, opened her mind, and asked . . .</blockquote><blockquote>And the living world answered.</blockquote><blockquote>Ha! It was like being accelerated to an incredible speed while standing still, it was like being lifted by a thousand warm hands. It was wonderful. And as the energy burnt though her, she turned it and focused it upon the underground reservoirs. The magma turned livid gold. And then to white hot, bursting upwards. (301)</blockquote><div class="Style1"><span lang="EN-US"><br />
</span></div><div class="Style1"><span lang="EN-US">In <a href="http://www.abc.net.au/rn/bookshow/stories/2009/2717478.htm">interviews McGahan has said</a> his original intention was to write a novel with no human characters; only weather and geological events. Finding such a task outside the realm of the novel form, McGahan’s compromise is a novel where geology and climate are not so much ‘characters’ as intimately proximate and understandable phenomena. Finally, the Orphan’s “understanding” of natural energy systems seems to be based on principles (and feelings) of how phenomena act across dimensions of time-space different to those made available in the natural or human sciences. Her understanding, perhaps, is situated at the boundary between geological times and human species time(s). She crosses that boundary, aided—for us as readers—by the Foreigner’s and the novel’s narrator’s narration of her thoughts and feelings, which push a fictional sense of understanding toward forms of madness that, in Aristotle’s theory of poetics, are a <a href="http://books.google.com.au/books?id=dQIfxmGPkWcC&pg=PA32&lpg=PA32&dq=Aristotle+poetics+probable+impossibility&source=bl&ots=sngY4i6q0Z&sig=1im1UVlTq0-sW5nCdqh4mWfU2Po&hl=en&ei=7sTwTPX9HpPEvQPi3dHmDQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=4&ved=0CCkQ6AEwAw#v=onepage&q&f=false">probable impossibility</a>. </span><br />
<div style="text-align: center;"><span lang="EN-US">*</span></div><span lang="EN-US">Seemingly locked into the closed circuitry of <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Capitalist-Realism-There-Alternative-Books/dp/1846943175">capitalist realism</a>, a sustained political and cultural response to the challenges of climate change hits a number of walls. Understanding, rather than just explaining, that human species have been geological agents since around the time of the invention of the steam engine--for at least the last 250 years--confronts those fundamental <a href="http://www.thomaslemkeweb.de/engl.%20texte/The%20Birth%20of%20Biopolitics%203.pdf">liberal political rationalities</a> that capitalist realism and its latest neoliberal phase are based in: that freedom is a function of the limits of the sovereign's or the state's capacity to promote security and growth; the corollary being that civil society and the 'market' are the spheres that 'naturally' produce security, growth and freedom. All three of these values of liberalism (<a href="http://krisis.eu/content/2010-2/krisis-2010-2-01-dean.pdf">biopolitics--the turn to life</a>) are threatened by climate change: the physical conditions on which the life of human species depends are seriously under threat as temperatures rise. Liberalism's long rapprochement with a fossil fuelled capitalist economy is, it appears, unsustainable and no guarantee of the freedom, growth and security of the human species. Belief in the natural genius of the market, which is what underlies Neoliberalism's faith in non-government solutions to challenges, is what has led us into the anthropocene. Understanding that we have been in this new epoch for a while is surely a first step in forging a realignment of ethics and politics: new <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Environmentality-Technologies-Government-Ecologies-Twenty-First/dp/0822334925">environmentalities</a>, perhaps. </span><br />
<span lang="EN-US"><br />
</span><br />
<span lang="EN-US">Accepting the explanation of climate change in anthropogenic global warming, challenges our understanding of human and natural time, human and natural histories. Fictive narrative, myth, and even <a href="http://www.ucpress.edu/book.php?isbn=9780520244764">Big History</a> provide ways into new realisms. These promise alternatives that can exceed the possibilities offered by the <a href="http://www.jstor.org/pss/20452506">Neo-Lib/Neo-Con </a>thinking that informs McEwan's glib, capitalist realist satire. </span></div></span></div><div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpLast" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm; mso-add-space: auto;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Palatino;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpLast" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm; mso-add-space: auto;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Palatino;"> </span></div><div class="Style1"><b><br />
</b></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.allenandunwin.com/BookCovers/resized_9781741758092_224_297_FitSquare.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://www.allenandunwin.com/BookCovers/resized_9781741758092_224_297_FitSquare.jpg" /></a></div><div class="Style1"><span lang="EN-US"><br />
</span></div><div align="center" class="Style1" style="text-align: center;"><div style="text-align: auto;"><br />
</div></div>Michael Chttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03997773018535384710noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8244167267206207060.post-68197815324584035852010-11-25T22:42:00.000+11:002010-11-25T22:42:58.067+11:002 hotels and the motels<object height="385" width="480"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/KCSo3JALcW8?fs=1&hl=en_US"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/KCSo3JALcW8?fs=1&hl=en_US" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="480" height="385"></embed></object><br />
<br />
<object height="385" width="480"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/nDe-HcHJsX0?fs=1&hl=en_US"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/nDe-HcHJsX0?fs=1&hl=en_US" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="480" height="385"></embed></object><br />
<br />
<object height="385" width="480"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/oLooccTvTVM?fs=1&hl=en_US"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/oLooccTvTVM?fs=1&hl=en_US" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="480" height="385"></embed></object>Michael Chttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03997773018535384710noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8244167267206207060.post-79671399622368807042010-11-22T22:24:00.000+11:002010-11-22T22:24:47.620+11:00Lowdowns<object height="385" width="480"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/yj4JCPXQjk8?fs=1&hl=en_US"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/yj4JCPXQjk8?fs=1&hl=en_US" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="480" height="385"></embed></object><br />
<br />
<object height="385" width="640"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/v6Ytde6tmkQ?fs=1&hl=en_US"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/v6Ytde6tmkQ?fs=1&hl=en_US" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="640" height="385"></embed></object>Michael Chttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03997773018535384710noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8244167267206207060.post-48790564723688048232010-10-12T20:51:00.000+11:002010-10-12T20:51:35.157+11:00Player One: Massey Lectures 2010Gen-Xer, Douglas Coupland, is presenting the Canadian radio lecture series--<a href="http://www.cbc.ca/ideas/episodes/massey-lectures/2010/11/08/massey-lectures-2010-player-one-what-is-to-become-of-us/">The Masseys</a>--this year and they are to be given in the form of a fictional novel. An excerpt is <a href="http://www2.macleans.ca/2010/10/07/rachel-wants-a-baby/">here</a>.<br />
<br />
<object height="385" width="480"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/l4fAmOZs9-c?fs=1&hl=en_US"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/l4fAmOZs9-c?fs=1&hl=en_US" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="480" height="385"></embed></object>Michael Chttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03997773018535384710noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8244167267206207060.post-2275362724066059262010-10-09T20:29:00.001+11:002010-10-10T17:32:59.670+11:00ParadiseI had vague 1990s memories of the Melbourne-based band, Paradise Motel: noir, cinematic, slow, heroin-tempo soundscapes. But on the recommendation of a mate I took a proverbial punt and caught them last night on their Hobart leg of a national tour. They were a chakra-opening revelation.<br />
<br />
The experience was supported by the venue decor: Sirens Ballroom up on the second floor in a wedding cake ceiling-rosed, vinyl-floored ballroom with plastered roof trusses, and a secreted balcony looking onto the stage area all creating a 1930s ambience, Berlin-esque. The support act was negligible: uninventive, melancholic, folk strains that suffered from a lack of guitar figures that broke from dull repetition.<br />
<br />
The Paradise Motel, however, launched into "German Girl", building their soundscape slowly, seductively, before a spine-opening, crystalline shock entered the ballroom. I was smitten. At times they sounded like a acid doused waking dream. At others like the warm rocking of the womb.<br />
<br />
As if the Triffids ran headlong into the Bad Seeds in the court of Nico.<br />
<br />
<object height="385" width="480"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/2dAEhIc57Rc?fs=1&hl=en_US"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/2dAEhIc57Rc?fs=1&hl=en_US" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="480" height="385"></embed></object>Michael Chttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03997773018535384710noreply@blogger.com0