Robert Andrew Phiddian

Political arithmetick: accounting for irony in Swift’s A Modest Proposal

Written in 1729, Jonathan Swift’s satirical essay, A Modest Proposal remains a challenge to the logic of current accounting practices. By shining a harshly sceptical light on the languages and assumptions of “Political arithmetick” (then a novel intellectual discipline), Swift shows the capacity of this ancestor discourse of modern accounting to blind its users to the reality of the situation they face. Argues that accounting discourse should open itself to “undisciplined” interpretation so as to reduce the risk of being blind to important factors that fully “disciplined” professional activity cannot see. In particular, argues that: a hermeneutic model based on deconstrnctive theories of blindness and insight deserves to be imported into accountancy theory from literary theory; that accountants should attend to satirical modes of writing, such as Swift’s Proposal, so as to unsettle and test the assumptions that underpin their professional practice. Consequently, addresses both the history of accountancy and its present habits of interpretation.

Counting culture to death: an Australian perspective on culture counts and quality metrics

ABSTRACT Metrics-based approaches to understanding the value of culture imply homogeneity of artistic purpose, invite political manipulation and demand time, money and attention from cultural organisations without proven benefit. The system retailing as Culture Counts, a dashboard approach to quality measurement that emerged from Western Australia and is currently trialling in Australia, the US, the UK and Asia, serves to further abstract assessment processes. Cultural policy-makers across international domains need a more robust appreciation of the limits of metrics. Statistical data, well channelled, may provide useful ancillary information. But, where questions of value are concerned, it cannot replace critical judgment.

Response: Culture counts: “A step along the way” or a step back?

Crossick, G., & Kaszynska, P. (2017). Understanding the value of arts & culture: The AHRC Cultural Value Project. London: Arts & Humanities Research Council. Gilmore, A., Glow, H., & Johanson, K. (2017). Accounting for quality: arts evaluation, public value and the case of “Culture Counts”. Cultural Trends. doi:10.1080/09548963.2017.1382761 Holden, J. (2006). Cultural value and the crisis of legitimacy: Why culture needs a democratic mandate. London: Demos. Hutter, M., & Throsby, D. (Eds.). (2008). Beyond price: Value in economics, culture and the arts. New York: Cambridge University Press. McCarthy, K. M., Ondaatje, E. H., Zakaras, L., & Brooks, A. (2005). Gifts of the muse: Reframing the debate about the benefits of the arts. Los Angeles: The RAND Corporation. Phiddian, R., Meyrick, J., Barnett, T., & Maltby, R. (2017). Counting culture to death: an Australian perspective on culture counts and quality metrics, Cultural Trends, 26(2), 174–180. Throsby, D. (2010). The economics of cultural policy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Campaign cartoons: no more man of steel

This article tracks the waning of John Howards authority as leader during the Australian federal election campaign of 2007 by focusing on the political cartoons in major newspapers. Political cartoons as analysed in this piece provide two interlinked things of interest to political analysts: (1) a clear account of the ebb and flow of election campaigns; and (2) a good gauge of political ‘strength’ of individuals as it is projected in the media. The story they tell for the 2007 campaign in Australia is of a tired government led by a once-strong leader who came to look faintly ridiculous in the face of circumstances he could no longer control.

Have They no Shame? Observations on the Effects of Satire

“Poetry makes nothing happen” (W.H. Auden, “In Memory of W. B. Yeats”, 1940): what if this is also true of satire? Surely not! Satire is the most obviously worldly of artistic modes, commenting directly on real-world events and people. When we read or view a really good piece of satire, we are confident that its targets must have shrivelled up in their hearts and changed their ways—or at least that the public subsequently rejected them, leaving them to die in ignominy. It seems our intuitive reaction is broadly wrong. At least as defined by political results, the gloomy, Audenesque conclusion is much closer to historical truth. However, if satire never (or very seldom) changes the course of history, that it achieves nothing does not follow. It functions to mobilise and express the harsh emotions of anger, contempt, disgust, and disdain on the part of creators and audiences. Some of the robustness of free political expression in liberal democratic traditions derives from the interplay of shaming and shamelessness generated by satirical practices. This chapter addresses themes and evidence from the foregoing chapters and discusses whether the emotional and cultural effects of political satire provide benefits that outweigh the almost complete lack of evidence of immediate instrumental results.

Towards a Discipline of Political Cartoon Studies: Mapping the Field

Although easily absorbed initially, political cartoons possess a complexity of method and context that affects attempts to study them. The disciplinary home of this scholarship is not clearly defined: is it media studies, cultural studies, humour studies, politics or fine arts? Since the field crosses all these disciplinary boundaries, it is reviewed and mapped to provide a guide to scholars researching political cartoons. Published research across a corpus of over 100 studies relating to political cartoons is surveyed. Topic areas include editorial cartoons, caricatures, strip and pocket cartoons and other images satirically commenting on politics. The large, representative base allows the identification of various subfields and common assumptions among the studies and approaches, taking an important step towards unifying the field of political cartooning research. The six major subfields are: meta-studies or surveys of political cartoons, the properties of political cartoons, their function as cultural mirrors, political cartoons’ impact, audience reception, and the cartoon ecosystem. The chapter’s focus is static images in print news media—editorial cartoons, caricatures, strip and pocket cartoons—used to make comment (usually humorous but also critical) on newsworthy events and figures. Work on political cartoons is distinguished from contiguous work on both non-political cartoon books and animations and political satire in prose and/or TV and digital media.

Emotional Light on Eighteenth-Century Print Culture

An established narrative in eighteenth-century studies of Britain details the early dominance of satire, the increase in sympathetic cultural modes, and the implications for different kinds of sociability generated by the long revolution in print culture.1 In this book, we do not wish to overturn this scholarship because we agree that it addresses fundamental aspects of change and stability in the society and culture of a nation that was rising to global prominence. Certainly the self-congratulatory Whig reading of history that has everything rising on a tide of progress towards some sort of liberal apotheosis has been very validly exposed to revision. Without the iron teleology, however, the chapters in this volume are unified by a conviction that important changes did occur in culture and society during the 1700s, and that they were linked dialogically with shifts in the ways emotions were experienced and valued.

A Face without Personality’: Coetzee’s Swiftian Narrators

Abstract: Much has been written about the complicated intertextual relationships between J. M. Coetzee’s novels and previous works by writers such as Franz Kafka, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Samuel Beckett, and, especially, Daniel Defoe. Relatively little has been written, in comparison, about any relationship between Coetzee and Defoe’s great contemporary, Jonathan Swift. We claim no extensive structural relationship between Coetzee’s novels and Swift’s works—nothing like the formal interlace between Robinson Crusoe and Foe, for example. We do claim, however, a strong and explicitly signalled likeness of narrative stance, marked especially by the ironic distance between author and protagonist in Gulliver’s Travels and Elizabeth Costello. We rehearse the extensive evidence of Coetzee’s attention to Swift (both in novels and criticism) and suggest that there is a Swiftian dimension to Coetzee’s oeuvre that is evident in several books, including Dusklands, Youth, Elizabeth Costello, and Diary of a Bad Year.

The revolution in political cartoons and the early Australian

In the 1960s, Australian political cartoons were transformed by three events: the arrival of Les Tanner at The Bulletin after Donald Horne was put in charge by Frank Packer; the radically new style and content of Bruce Pettys cartoons during The Australians first decade; and the later development of a stable of cartoonists at The Age. In this period, the now common assumption that cartoonists are ‘always left-wing’ came into being – an obvious irony given the career arcs of proprietors like Packer and Rupert Murdoch. This article focuses on the middle part of this narrative, the impact of Bruce Pettys visually and politically radical cartooning for The Australian from day one. In what ways does Pettys work incarnate the anti-establishment ‘ethos’ of the young newspaper? What were the visual and political consequences for other broadsheets? How did this ‘left-wing’ impetus end at The Australian and live on in other papers?

May the Less Threatening Leader of the Opposition Win: The cartoonists’ view of election 2010

National affairs correspondent for The Age, Tony Wright, expressed widespread frustration at the media-managed frivolity of the 2010 federal election campaign when he asserted on radio that ‘this campaign has been made for the satirists’ (ABC 2010). From our observation of the editorial cartoons of the campaign, the level of engagement with significant issues was too slight even for the satirists to get much of a handle on events. Indeed, it was only the ABC TV show Gruen Nation that broke new satirical ground in this campaign, and that was because it focused on the advertising and spin rather than the political substance. It debuted in its election mode with an audience of 1.6 million, ‘winning’ the night against the commercial channels, and developed a strong following for the quality and wit of its attack on election advertising (The Sunday Age, 1 August 2010). The success of this meta-analysis of the political game reflects the trouble satirists in more traditional modes had in finding anything much to grasp. Wright was only half-right about the campaign for the cartoonists; it was a joke for them, certainly, but mostly a rather bad and empty one.