Paul Magee

Introduction: Foreign Cookbooks

ion involves “the effacing of the particular’s detail. Given both the distancing of location – the place of the abstract ideal is not the present – and the distancing of time – the abstract ideal is only present as a possible future – it is clear why any recourse to abstraction will have to involve the effacing of the everyday.” A Benjamin, ‘Having to exist’, in Angelaki, Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 5(3) December 2000 p. 52. For Benjamin, this effacing is of direct consequence to the thinking of authenticity: “Defining that which is proper to human existence beyond the world of the everyday and necessitating the denigration of the ordinary, locates the reach of the authentic as beyond the fact of existence.” (p. 53) Benjamin will proceed to reject the very opposition between particular and abstract in favour of a thinking that tackles the simple present tense fact of “having to exist.” Which is fine in its own way, and interesting: “to begin to think is to recognise that thinking will have already begun. The fact of existence is already an insistent presence.” (p. 54). But the reason “thinking will have already begun” is that any given thought is at once an immediate articulation and a general cultural pattern. Take the word “everyday”: it only means something in this sentence because of the practice of INTRODUCTION

What Distinguishes Scholarship from Art

The paper concerns Michael Biggs and Daniel Büchlers 2010 claim that the creative arts doctorate is a contradictory amalgam of two discursive modes, one aimed at translating a research experience into a ‘single, unified answer’ to a problem, the other at eliciting a plurality of responses in diverse audiences through an evocative artefact. I set forth the lines of this critique, and then compare the analysis of scholarly method it is based upon with Jacques Lacans fascinatingly similar account of what he calls ‘the university discourse’. My discussion diverges from Biggs and Büchlers, however, when it comes to considering Lacans own writing style, which seems far more geared to eliciting a plurality of responses than presenting a ‘single, unified answer’. Lacan is, of course, a psychoanalyst. But many of the authors broadly associated with him in this stylistic regard (Derrida, Foucault, Serres, Deleuze, Barthes, among others) are academics. By Biggs and Büchlers analysis, they write as artists. This is curious, given that we cite them as our pre-eminent academic authorities. I reflect on how we might have to nuance Biggs and Büchlers distinction to accommodate this paradox, and further consider its implications for the style of humanities scholarship an exegesis might best assume, to satisfy critiques like theirs.

‘We do not know exactly what we are going to say until we have said it’: interview data on how poems are made

ABSTRACT My paper reflects on an archive of in-depth interviews I and my colleagues have recorded with Anglophone poets, from a variety of countries, North and South. In particular, I reflect on responses to a question that split that field into two opposing camps. It concerned the function of spontaneity in poetic composition. The majority of poets interviewed said yes, often quite enthusiastically, to Auden’s proposition that when we ‘genuinely speak’ we are unaware of what we are about to say; many also seemed happy to affirm his implication that this is a key source of poetic value. Those who rejected these ideas were often passionate on the matter as well.

‘His Face Bore a Striking Resemblance to My Father's’: On the Poet's Internal Critic

An analysis of what Mayakovsky, Auden, Jarrell and other modern poets have written about their editing practices reveals a tension between the modernist proclamation that ‘there are no rules’ (Mayakovsky) and the fact that poets nonetheless need to find some sort of critical standard by which to edit their own work. In the case of an extreme egomaniac like Mayakovsky, one might be tempted to equate that critical standard with the massive law of his own ego – were it not that some part of him clearly finds its productions at times wanting. But if so, where does that critical voice come from? Upon what does it base its judgements? The psychoanalytic theory of the super-ego is key to my argument, which poses a challenge not merely to New Criticisms ideas about objective judgement, but also to the Freudian, and now common-sense, equation between the artists work and the freedom of unconscious utterance. It suggests that such freedom comes by way of the critical voice in ones own head.

Opening conference address by Paul Magee, CSAA President

Why am I quoting these ridiculous comments, and why am I doing so only days after Australia’s new Rudd government ratified the Kyoto protocol, which it did after just one hour in office? Why rifle through the dustbin of recent history? Actually, I think we can read a great deal about contemporary political possibilities into ex-Senator Campbell’s comments, and not least because they come from what is now the losing side. What interests me in Campbell’s comments is the metaphor he relies upon, which is growth. Now on the face of it there is nothing metaphoric in Campbell’s words: the population is indeed increasing. But try replacing that magical word ‘growing’ with a few synonyms:

Editor's Introduction To The Unaustralia Papers

‘I want to die’: that, according to Gemma Blackwood, is the desire that films like Wolf Creek articulate for their audiences. Horror really is horrible. In ‘Wolf Creek: an UnAustralian Story?’ Blackwood discusses the question of whether this extremely violent 2005 film will have a negative impact upon Australian tourism, as some early reviewers predicted. One might expect it to. Wolf Creek describes a sadistic outback murderer who kills two female backpackers, slowly. Their lone male companion escapes to tell the police, but he can’t remember where the events took place. By the end of the film, Mick Taylor is still out there, freely killing roos. What effects do movies, and the characters within them, have upon the attractions of place? Blackwood’s answer to the question of fiction’s impact upon the world around it comes by way of tourism research. Researchers such as Peter Phipps have demonstrated that the association of place with death and danger often serves to raise its power as a magnet for tourism, particularly in the younger market. Making the outback more authentically dangerous and wild, Wolf Creek may well, Blackwood suggests, be just the film to draw backpackers in. But are we really talking about place here, or anywhere in UNAUSTRALIA? This is Blackwood on ‘Australian Gothic’, the genre to which she sees Wolf Creek belonging:

Introduction To Unaustralia

The topic of this year’s conference is UNAUSTRALIA. What is this place? The first thing to say about UNAUSTRALIA is that it does not exist. When I say that UNAUSTRALIA does not exist, I mean ‘by any reasonable definition’. The point, and the justification for having a conference on this theme, is that reasonable definitions are often wrong. Take the reasonable definition of unemployment that forms the basis of the Australian Bureau of Statistics’ monthly unemployment rate. At present the figure is 4.7 per cent, a 30-year low. John Quiggan, who sees unemployment as the Howard government’s ‘worst policy failure’, has argued that such figures are quite misleading (Quiggan, 2004, p. 178). The fact is that our statistical measures were introduced in the 1960s when the overwhelming majority of jobs were full time. There is no measure to distinguish between fulland part-time work. If you work one hour or more a week, you are counted as employed. By including a measure of such underemployment in its statistics, the University of Newcastle’s Centre of Full Employment and Equity gave an August 2006 unemployment rate of 9.45 per cent Centre of Full Employment & Equity (CofFEE), 2006. Add disguised unemployment to that figure, taking into account various forms of benefits and training that provide refuge for people who would otherwise like to work, and you get something like three or four times the official unemployment rate, if not more. In 2004, Quiggan was talking about 20 per cent unemployment among adult males (Quiggan, 2004, p. 179).

Introduction to Professor Jacques Rancière

It’s my very great pleasure to introduce Professor Jacques Rancière. Professor Rancière is the Emeritus Professor of Aesthetics and Politics at the University of Paris VIII where he taught from 1969 to 2000. He continues to teach, as a visiting professor, in a number of American universities, including Rutgers, Harvard, Johns Hopkins, and Berkeley. Widely regarded as one of Europe’s foremost contemporary intellectuals, Professor Rancière has published 18 books, with another due for publication in February. His work covers an extraordinary range of topics: from pedagogy, political theory, historiography, workers’ history, cinema and photography through to literature. His work has been translated into 14 languages, and has been subject to numerous special issues, symposia and critical commentaries. His latest titles to appear in English translation are Disagreement, Politics and Philosophy (1998), Short Voyages to the Land of the People (2003), The Flesh of Words (2004a), The Philosopher and his Poor (2004b), The Politics of Aesthetics (2005) and Film Fables (2006), while The Hatred of Democracy is soon to be published. Professor Rancière’s work is characterized throughout by the articulation of startling theses on the nature of communication and hierarchy, theses which he then proceeds to unfold, or allows to unfold, in the reader’s mind. His 1987 book, The Ignorant Schoolmaster, concerns Joseph Jacotot, a pedagogue who discovered, in 1818, that it is possible to teach what one does not know (Rancière, 1991). The idea that you can teach what you do not know may seem paradoxical, but I think it will also make sense to those of us who teach in creative arts faculties. There would simply be no point in teaching if we already knew what the poets, visual artists and novelists whom we teach were going to produce. In so far as we act to elicit another’s creativity, we teach what we do not know. I think one can apply such an analysis with equal justice to the work we do in the humanities too. If you’ve ever had the strange experience of someone thanking you for an idea they received from you in a lecture or a paper, when you’re quite sure you never actually said just what they’ve attributed to you, you’ll know what I mean. By drawing our attention to such gaps and sutures in the transmission of knowledge, Professor Rancière’s work puts us in a space that is also

'The Single Greatest Cause of Domestic Housefires': On the Hole in Hegel's Aesthetics

Problematising the opposition Hegel makes in his Introductory Lectures on Aesthetics between art and science, an opposition which is of course not just Hegels, this paper attempts to theorise the aesthetics of non-fiction. From considering Wittgenstein and Peirces views on the logic and aesthetics of being, it turns to consider its authors own writing practice. For I am producing all this, and sending it out into the world in this fashion, as part of my literature search for The 14th Floor , an experimental novel. And this article is actually a letter to my supervisor. Conceived literally as a science experiment, The 14th Floor , and the resultant prac report I will produce about the process of its writing, will aim to undermine something of the illusory divide between art and science, fiction and non-fiction, novelty and knowledge. The article also constitutes a consideration of how we might use the new doctorates in creative arts to stage collisions between traditional knowledges and contemporary creative practices, and so generate the new. I plant a series of autobiographical disruptions into the above, in the form of descriptions of Moscow in late Soviet perestroika , where I lived and first learnt that life blows up, sometimes. And that realities, facts and fictions, follow in its wake.