Image of the Prague skyline courtesy of Pavelm - licenced under Creative Commons.
I didn’t comment, but I read the thread on Kim’s post on the crimes of Joseph Fritzl and discourses in the media (Austrian and otherwise) about cultural and national responsibility. I found the thread a fascinating read, and I’m not certain that anyone could finally arbitrate the question of whether a certain Nazism or its social legacy was actually at stake here or whether to think that is to misunderstand the nature of causation and social pathologies as they manifest themselves in individual lives and choices. That’s forcing the two positions argued somewhat, and occluding a lot of nuance, but I suspect that the debate’s conditions of possibility include different levels of explanation and different methods of thought and intellectual work - I thought some of the borders of the social scientific and humanistic worldviews were both marked out and blurred in that discussion. It ought to be possible to integrate the two, but saying that is harder than doing it because there is a certain split - that’s not just manifested in disciplinary training and territory in the academy - between a more hermeneutic and a more positivist style of thought. That’s actually a dividing line that’s inscribed in our everyday culture as well as in our intellectual traditions in the West, and it’s possibly a most unfortunate divide. But then national borders, and cultures, are contingent constructions of Western modernity too.
Anyway, that’s something of a prelude to some thoughts the thread stimulated for me. I remembered I’d written a post back in December 2004 on W.G. Sebald’s work. At the time, I wrote, apropos of his A Natural History of Destruction:
Literature has often been seen as a mirror of meaning, a way of sense-making, what the literary scholar Erich Auerbach called, following Aristotle, Mimesis. To take the example of the hitherto unparalleled destruction wrought by the Thirty Years War from 1618 to 1648, German literature produced such classics as Johann Jakob Von Grimmelshausen’s Simplicissimus (first published in 1669) and much more recently, Günter Grass ’ The Meeting at Telgte.
There is a massive, and often fine, literature of the Holocaust. But going in search of a similar literature of the suffering of German citizens during the Second World War, Sebald was surprised to find it scant, and largely unsatisfactory.
There’s a thought provoking review of Richard Barbrook’s new book Imaginary Futures: From Thinking Machines to the Global Village at Mute magazine. I came across it via bookforum.com, and my curiosity was piqued because I received a flyer for Imaginary Futures enclosed with another book I recently ordered from Pluto Books in the UK (whom I wholeheartedly endorse for customer service btw - not only did they deliver a book I needed from Britain within a week, but I got an email telling me about it from an actual person as opposed to an Amazonbot).
Ian A. Boal asks some interesting questions - how did we get from seeing the computer as an instrument of dehumanisation (think HAL in 2001 and other such fictional and filmic representations of the 60s and 70s) to seeing it as a utopian saviour of humanity? How can we understand the history of “digital utopianism” and what of the interests and social positions of those who spruiked it?
I don’t recall much about Anzac Day from my primary school years, and for a number of reasons my high school recollections of Anzac Day are very much coloured by having read Alan Seymour’s play “One Day of the Year” in Grade Eight in 1980 - a play which captured a range of ambiguous reactions to this commemoration. The themes are well summed up in this review by Stephen Dunne of a 2003 performance in Sydney:
Central to Alan Seymour’s modern Australian classic is the paradoxical nature of Anzac Day. We chose as our venerated, inescapable symbol of military remembrance a campaign that was both a tactical fiasco and a defeat.
In the 1980s, the ritual of Anzac Day appeared to be on its last legs. At least in Brisbane, the public commemorations were ill attended, and such commentary as was about often consisted of discussions about whether it had a future, mixed with reflections at Australians’ lack of bombastic patriotism and what I think was a central theme - the immense suffering produced by war. Interviews with old diggers often highlighted this - and while there was also a sense that war had been inescapable, there was also a definite belief that other modes of solving humanity’s problems were much to be preferred. Vietnam Vets, on the whole, were at that time still largely unintegrated in the day.
Indeed, some of the last surviving Anzacs were to have their moment in the spotlight in the 90s, when the official script had generally changed, and appeared out of synch with a revived nationalism - some refused to march, and some would say nothing other than their experience of war had been of its futility. Many resisted becoming symbols of a national spirit, preferring to remember their own personal stories and the meanings the experience of war had for them, their mates and their families.
It has often been said that as Australians we have a predilection for remembering and even celebrating our failures. The ABC does a lot of remembering at these times. This year there have been a couple of segments covering an event that may eventually take over from ANZAC in our consciousness, an event that occurred 90 years ago on the third ANZAC Day.
I speak, of course, of the Australian counter-attack that took the French town of Villers-Bretonneux. This year for the first time there will be a dawn service on the actual day.
The Australian flags are hung, toy kangaroos are crammed in shop windows and now all the small French town of Villers-Bretonneux is waiting for is Anzac Day.
Up to 6,000 Australians are expected to descend on the rural town on Friday for a dawn service commemorating the 90th anniversary of its liberation by Anzac [actually Australian, I think] troops on April 25, 1918.
The rural town, in the heart of the Somme region north of Paris, holds annual memorial services for the diggers - but this year is the first time it will host a dawn service on Anzac Day itself, instead of the nearest Saturday to April 25.
Conservative and strongly pro-Israel Professor Bill Rubenstein has had a letter published in the April edition of Quadrant which ends with the following observation:
It might also be worth noting that all of the infamous twentieth-century genocides in the period from 1914 to 1980, from the Armenian massacres in 1915-16 through the Nazi Holocaust to Asian communism, were plainly the result of the breakdown of the European elite and governmental structure in the First World War, and the consequential rise to power of fascism and communism. It is as certain as any counterfactual can be that none of these genocides and massacres would have occurred had the European powers not gone to war in 1914.
William D. Rubinstein
(Professor of History),
University of Wales–Aberystwyth,
Penglais, UK.
One of the most interesting things about the Australia 2020 summit is an accentuation of a trend that was already evident - the broadening of public focus on long term issues and possible solutions, which I suspect will be one of the enduring contributions of the Rudd government. That’s also having an effect on the media - responses which are flip come to be seen as the professional cynicism they really are, and what can only be described as frenzied outpourings of indignation and higly predictable pontificating indicate only the angst suffered by the relics of the Howard era at the fact that their gatekeeping role is fast evaporating. I think what we’re seeing is the final collapse of many stereotyped stances in dichotomised public debates which were characteristic of the Howard era.
Looking at it in retrospect, a lot of the Howard era rhetoric continued to attack Paul Keating - or at least various myths and perceptions about what his government stood for. That’s evident in some aspects of the revival of the Republican debate. As Paul Norton noted here, the same old arguments have been trotted out, taken out of storage for a rerun of 1999. But, as the comments on his thread from anti-Republicans demonstrate, the same old tactics characteristic of John Howard himself - a narrow, niggling legalism, the summoning up of multiple spectres of doom allegedly flowing from even the most minimalist constitutional change, and quibbles about cost - have themselves been resurrected. I don’t think that it’s worth wasting an ounce of energy or time in rebutting all these phantom charges. Their employment as rhetorical weapons is itself designed as a trap - to narrow and shift the debate onto a field of the anti-Republicans’ choosing. Classic Howard.
Absolutely nothing, answers Tony Judt, writing in the New York Review of Books.
Judt, a conservative historian, but an excellent one, looks at the way the horrors of the 20th century - rather than being viewed as stark lessons are increasingly seen as a treasure trove to be mined to construct the materials of postmodern morality plays. In an interesting twist on the American exceptionalism thesis, he makes a powerful point about the absence of war from the territory of the continental United States has led to a dangerous militarisation of society and politics, while in Europe after World War Two, the devastation total war brought both to the “winners” and the losers led to a will to conduct political affairs non-violently, and the sorts of ethical postures and institutions now derided by the angry voices of American Empire.
As a consequence, the United States today is the only advanced democracy where public figures glorify and exalt the military, a sentiment familiar in Europe before 1945 but quite unknown today. Politicians in the US surround themselves with the symbols and trappings of armed prowess; even in 2008 American commentators excoriate allies that hesitate to engage in armed conflict. I believe it is this contrasting recollection of war and its impact, rather than any structural difference between the US and otherwise comparable countries, which accounts for their dissimilar responses to international challenges today. Indeed, the complacent neoconservative claim that war and conflict are things Americans understand—in contrast to naive Europeans with their pacifistic fantasies —seems to me exactly wrong: it is Europeans (along with Asians and Africans) who understand war all too well. Most Americans have been fortunate enough to live in blissful ignorance of its true significance.
If you’d like to see a larger image of the photos in this post, click on them then click on “full view” once you’re inside the gallery.
Once you’re out of the inner city, the vista the suburbs present to your eye from the train window is a tad undifferentiated. Sure, you can pick where weatherboard gives way to brick, as you travel through time as well as space, but if you’re not paying attention, it’s not that hard to miss your station. And in Brisbane you’re out of the inner city pretty quickly - the distance of two stations does it. Unlike Sydney and Melbourne, you’re speedily in the realm of big quarter acre blocks with old houses perched and shifting on their stilts as they hug the verdant hills, knowing that they’re interlopers. But some - landmarks is the wrong word - icons compel your eye’s focus.
No one who’s ever caught the Caboolture or Sandgate-Shorncliffe trains would ever miss Albion station. The old flour mill is too delightfully out of scale and incongruous to miss. It dwarfs its surroundings.
It’s lain vacant for six years now - as with so many other noteable Brisbane buildings, the victim of a tussle between the Council and developers, eventually to be resolved mostly in the latter’s favour - with the token addition of a modicum of public housing (which will give the new residents something to whine about) and a claim about economic renewal. The increase in the value of the surrounding real estate usually goes untouted - at least by the planning authorities, concerned ostensibly with public purposes as they are. It’s this sort of thing that led to a lot of disillusion with the Labor administrations of Jim Soorley and Tim Quinn, and probably contributed to former Labor leader David Hinchliffe almost losing his ward in the election just a few short weeks ago.
I don’t think you can sing along as you could to Paul’s post on yesterday’s anniversary, but my thoughts on the enduring legacy of the Waterfront dispute are in my column at New Matilda today.
As one of a number of Brisbane university staff and students who walked several kilometres in the rain in support of the workers at the Port of Brisbane, I’d like to commemorate the occasion by linking to a great song, written by the late, great Stan Rogers, and performed here by Makem & Clancy, about a bunch of Canadian maritime workers who wouldn’t just let management cut them, and their ship, adrift for the sake of profits. Up the workers!
1968 was a very eventful year, and we’re seeing a number of anniversaries which - hopefully - stimulate further reflection on some of the key personalities, cultural and political events four decades down the track. Friday the 4th of April was the fortieth anniversary of the death of Dr Martin Luther King.
There are a number of such reflections around in the blogosphere this weekend. Andrew Bartlett provides a number of valuable links, including one to Joseph Palermo at The Huffington Post who makes an interesting and important point about the difference in perceptions about King before and after his death:
Contrary to mainstream belief today, while King was alive he was never widely heralded in the media as a “savior” or a “great leader.” He was just as often denounced as a “polarizing” figure and his work was often denigrated in racist terms. As was the case with Robert F. Kennedy, the love affair with MLK only took off long after he had become a kind of martyr.
King had actually found himself at something of a crossroads in 1968 - most of the civil rights the movement had been seeking had been embodied in law - largely through LBJ’s decision to force them through a mainly reticent if not unwilling Congress. Continue reading ‘Martin Luther King - the legacy’
I was actually thinking about this today when I read Scott McLemee’s piece in Inside Higher Ed - this decade has no name. The “Naughties” never caught on (and for good reason probably). The 2000s is ambiguous. That, I reckon, has done something odd to our time-sense. Maybe there’ve been more periodisations like post-s11, but I, for one at any rate, had hardly realised the decade was coming to an end despite the 08 thing.
What’s interesting about McLemee’s take is that he argues there may be no recognisable Zeigeist in a cultural sense for these times, and when you think about it, in an age where the medium is not the message but the culture is the commodity, the absence of a brand is puzzling. Continue reading ‘Mysterons’
There’s also little doubt that for once, a vox pops story in the papers is probably spot on. Kevin Rudd and Anna Bligh aside, most Quincelanders won’t welcome the bestowal by the Man of Steel Mark II of the title of “honorary Queenslander” on one George W. Bush. I certainly wouldn’t be welcoming Bush if he ever popped in to claim his crown. But it did get me thinking about a delightful little incident recounted in the Robert A. Caro biography of a more genuine Texan, LBJ, who made an unscheduled stop near Winton in Northwestern Queensland during World War II when his navy plane’s navigational equipment failed on route from Darwin:
… they hit the ground with scarcely a jolt. Australian ranchers suddenly appeared, and, recalls one of the crew, “Right away Lieutenant Commander Johnson gets busy. He begins to get acquainted. They tell him where we are and some of them go off to get a truck to take us into town where we can telephone, and more keep coming, and Johnson is shaking hands all round, and he comes back and tells us these are real folks - the best damn folks in the world, except maybe the folks in his own Texas. Pretty soon he knows all their first names, and they’re telling him why there ought to be a high tarriff on wool, and there’s no question he swung that county for Johnson before we left. He was in his element. I know he sure swung the… crew. He can carry that precinct any day.”
I have a feeling Kevin Rudd might have read the Caro biog. Of course, whatever other sterling qualities Texans have, a sense of irony probably isn’t among them.
My main academic project at the moment (also known as “bringing a doctoral dissertation to a timely completion”) is grandiloquently titled “The Phenomenology of Utopia”. In some ways, that probably gives a misleading suggestion of what it’s actually about, because I’m not really trying to write a phenomenology of utopia, but rather it’s a gesture towards Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s changing conception of the political. I pose the question of whether some sort of telos - or better a horizon of expectation - is in fact necessary to supplement and enflesh with meaning what Weber characterised as the dullness or routinisation of political action. A horizon, though, that doesn’t entail an uncritical acceptance of liberal premises about reason and progress, but which also avoids the totalitarian qualities of Soviet Marxist dreaming. So, in a way, it’s an argument for the necessary intertwining of historical meaning and political action coupled with an awareness that it’s impossible to endow history, or politics, with a universal meaning. That’s a paradox, I’d argue, that is far from theoretical, and one that paradoxically shapes our current world, and crucially, to the degree it’s not recognised, constrains how we imagine our futures through an ideological act of foreclosure.
But that’s by the by, and I’ve actually got no intention of discussing all that. Rather, I wanted to segue into something that’s come up in my reading for what I’m working on at the moment - the discussion in Darko Suvin’s Metamorphoses of Science Fiction of not just a poetics but a politics of science fiction, something that Fredric Jameson draws upon and draws out in a book strictly speaking more central to my concerns - his recent Archaeologies of the Future. (You can get a sense of Suvin’s point of view on the definition of science fiction in this article in The New Humanist). In Metamorphoses, Suvin actually eschews discussion of genre science fiction (though for a reason that isn’t distaste or lack of enthusiasm), but he does appear to want to endow “science” with a certain privilege, which is no doubt related to his own premises as a Marxist critic. He’s very dismissive, therefore, of fantasy as a literary genre in a way that’s not very nuanced. Continue reading ‘Distant Suns’
Larvatus Prodeo is an Australian group blog which discusses politics, sociology, culture, life, religion and science from a left of centre perspective. more»
There’s a thought provoking review of Richard Barbrook’s new book 
1968 was a very eventful year, and we’re seeing a number of anniversaries which - hopefully - stimulate further reflection on some of the key personalities, cultural and political events four decades down the track. Friday the 4th of April was the fortieth anniversary of the death of Dr Martin Luther King. 
Alles vergängliche ist nur ein Gleichnis.
[I’m trying to see 
My main academic project at the moment (also known as “bringing a doctoral dissertation to a timely completion”) is grandiloquently titled “The Phenomenology of Utopia”. In some ways, that probably gives a misleading suggestion of what it’s actually about, because I’m not really trying to write a phenomenology of utopia, but rather it’s a gesture towards Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s changing conception of the political. I pose the question of whether some sort of telos - or better a horizon of expectation - is in fact necessary to supplement and enflesh with meaning what Weber characterised as the dullness or routinisation of political action. A horizon, though, that doesn’t entail an uncritical acceptance of liberal premises about reason and progress, but which also avoids the totalitarian qualities of Soviet Marxist dreaming. So, in a way, it’s an argument for the necessary intertwining of historical meaning and political action coupled with an awareness that it’s impossible to endow history, or politics, with a universal meaning. That’s a paradox, I’d argue, that is far from theoretical, and one that paradoxically shapes our current world, and crucially, to the degree it’s not recognised, constrains how we imagine our futures through an ideological act of foreclosure.
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