Showing papers in "Thesis Eleven in 2008"

Ghettos and Anti-Ghettos: An Anatomy of the New Urban Poverty:

Abstract: Loïc Wacquant: This book was born of the confluence of two shocks, the first personal and the second political. The personal shock was the firsthand discovery of the black American ghetto – or what remains of it – when I moved to Chicago and lived for six years on the edge of the city’s South Side. Coming from France, I was appalled by the intensity of the urban desolation, racial segregation, social deprivation and street violence concentrated in this terra non grata that was universally feared, shunned and denigrated by outsiders, including by many scholars. The political shock was the diffusion of a moral panic about ghettoization in France and through much of Western Europe. In the 1990s, the media, politicians and even some researchers came to believe that working-class neighborhoods at the periphery of European cities were turning into ‘ghettos’ on the pattern of the United States. And so public debate and state policy were reoriented toward fighting the growth of these so-called ghettos, based on the premise that urban poverty was being ‘Americanized’, that is, stamped by deepening ethnic division, rising segregation and rampant criminality. Bring these two shocks together and you have the question that animated a decade of research: are the US ghetto and the European lowerclass districts with concentrations of immigrants converging and, if not, what

Is There a Good Case for New Zealand Exceptionalism

Abstract: The upsurge in cultural nationalism in New Zealand has failed to produce a good case that New Zealand is an exceptional society. The reason for this is that New Zealand has not had a chance to deve...

Academic Entrepreneurship and the Creative Economy

Abstract: This article explores the relationships between several notions: the `creative economy'; New Growth Theory and the primacy of ideas; academic entrepreneurship; and the new paradigm of cultural prod...

The Uses and Abuses of Gramsci

Abstract: Antonio Gramsci is today the most translated Italian theorist. His theory has been used extensively in English language publications in cultural studies and international relations. This article ex...

Sovereignty, Governance and the Political: The Problematic of Foucault

Abstract: Contemporary Foucauldian research assimilates the political with governance. This formulation dates to Foucault's emphasis on the significance of the anti-Machiavellians in introducing the concept of governance into political theory. Returning to Machiavelli, we argue that early modern political theory was instead characterized by the simultaneous problematization of ruler and ruled, and the co-constitution of sovereignty and governance. We then outline the relation of ruler and ruled in the political structure of the democratic sovereign. Concepts of both sovereignty and governance are necessary to theorize the political in modernity, including the dangers that arise from fusing sovereignty and governance, as occurred during the Nazi period in Germany, when the distinction between the sovereign people and the governed population was conflated.

Reframing Majoritarian National Identities Within an Antipodean Perspective

Abstract: Arguing for the merits of an antipodean perspective that embraces the linked historical and current relations between Tasman, British and other worlds, this paper focuses on the majoritarian responses of those of English ancestry in Britain and within the British diaspora to wide ranging changes that potentially challenge their national supremacy in both contexts. After briefly assessing some of the approaches to exploring the identities of the 'English/ British' separately in Australia and New Zealand, some suggestions are made about how majoritarian narratives are best reframed, conceptually and methodologically, both within the antipodes and the broader contexts within which they have always been placed. The adoption of an antipodean perspective is deemed necessary in order to understand how changes in majority status and shifts in national identity are mutually constituted within and across the above worlds.

Theological History and the Legitimacy of the Modern Social Sciences: Considerations on the Work of Hans Blumenberg:

Abstract: This article explores the much neglected work of the German philosopher and cultural theorist Hans Blumenberg, a figure still relatively little known in the Anglophone world. The thesis is defended that Blumenberg's conception of The Legitimacy of the Modern Age (1966) offers valuable resources for addressing some important questions about the philosophical self-understanding of the modern social sciences in relation to theological and religious sources of thought and language. The article begins with an assessment of the contemporary relevance of Blumenberg's critique of the idea of modern scientific culture as a merely `secularized form' of theological thinking. This critique is then compared with Blumenberg's account of the relationship of theoretico-scientific inquiry to mythological consciousness in his second major philosophical monograph of 1979, Work on Myth. The article concludes with a range of reflections on ways in which Blumenberg's work helps us understand how certain explanatory constructs ...

Unsettling Recolonization: Labourism, Keynesianism and Australasia From the 1890s to tHe 1950S

Abstract: This paper addresses the now entrenched historiography of the Australian Settlement and New Zealand variations thereof. Against the central premise of this historiography, that a particular regime of domestic insulation and external orientation to the British market constrained development and persisted unchanged until the neo-liberal restructuring of the 1980s, it is argued here that the political economy of the beginning of the 20th century was profoundly destabilized by the Depression. As a result, a new, Keynesian regime was established in New Zealand from the late 1930s and in Australia a few years later. The entrenchment of this regime depended upon adoption by remade conservative parties by the end of the 1940s.

Equality and Exclusion: the Racial Constitution of Colonial Liberalism:

Abstract: In his path-breaking study, A Colonial Liberalism: The Lost World of Three Victorian Visionaries (1991), Stuart Macintyre makes a case for the distinctiveness of colonial liberalism and its local habitat, with liberals' insistence on the principle of political equality and the democratic right of self-government. Macintyre's three visionaries — Higinbotham, Pearson and Syme — were also leading crusaders against Chinese immigration, which peaked in Victoria in the 1850s, the decade in which self-government and manhood suffrage were introduced. The local habitat wore a racial aspect. In this essay I suggest that it was precisely the democratic ideal of equality, espoused in the context of Chinese immigration and colonial nation-building, that led to the insistence on racial exclusion. Colonial liberals called for racial exclusion because of, not in spite of, their commitment to democracy. The apparent paradox of a policy of exclusion promoted in the name of equality was, I suggest, definitive of the project...

The Discovery of Islands and the Stories of Settlement

Abstract: This article is a response to a paper presented to the New Zealand Historical Association in 1991 by J. G. A. Pocock, who suggests that Pakeha (European) settlers are now becoming tangata whenua (people of the land) in the same way that Maori did. The principal idea examined is what an `indigenous' identity means once historical claims have been settled by Maori against the Crown, and whether there is any merit in the term `indigenous'. The article then examines the logic behind the idea of `original occupation' and the assumed rights associated with this concept.

On Paul Ricoeur and the Translation— Interpretation of Cultures

Abstract: This article presents Paul Ricoeur's ideas about translation in view of giving some guidelines for the interpretation of cultures. Ricoeur's `hermeneutics of the self', which stresses the creativity of capable human being, has its source in a conviction of the superabundance of sense over the abundance of nonsense. It is the problem of the transmission of meaning from one language to another, from one culture to another that gives impetus to his preoccupation with translation. Ricoeur's radical astonishment before the plurality of languages and cultures and his deep conviction about `communication' among human beings made him realize the urgent `task of translation' that is accompanied by a `task of morning'. If translation is the paradigm of all exchanges, its practice can provide us some guidelines in the dialogue of cultures. First, one must courageously open oneself to the `test' of the Other, to welcome difference and respect it as unsurpassable. Second, one must wager on the possibility of an `equiv...

Post-War New Zealand Literary Critique

Abstract: For most of the 20th century literature and criticism of literature functioned as central engines of cultural change across the western world This was especially the case in ex-colonial societies like New Zealand where writers and intellectuals frequently expressed a desire to create sophisticated local cultures which could compete with the foundation societies in Europe Between 1940 and 1984 New Zealand writers and intellectuals developed a mode of literary criticism which this essay refers to as `Literary Critique' for this very reason In the absence of well established cultural traditions and a sense that they had a duty to import and indigenise western intellectual thought in order to further the evolution of New Zealand culture, a series of writers wrote often scathing critiques of their culture, using literature as their point of entry Post-War New Zealand Literary Critique stands as evidence of a provincial, masculine, and angry intellectual culture

Reclaiming Antiquity Within the Spaces of Disciplinarity

Abstract: Foucault's account of the shift from the sovereign, or juridical, to the disciplinary mode of power produces an understanding of the operations of power cast in terms of individuals' imbeddedness within networks of dependencies specified by `norms' that measure individual performance according to the principles of equivalency (solidarity) and difference (`ab-normality'). Individuals, therefore, must not understand themselves as finally ensnared or trapped by the specific distribution of power within which they find themselves. Under determinate conditions and according to precise strategies, they can always modify power's grip upon themselves. Foucault finds interesting prototypes for this in the ethical practices of ancient Greece that, in his view, satisfied the human desire for rules and form at the same time that they gave scope to the human impatience for liberty. Foucault turns to them in his late work, believing that they may have something to offer in place of modern moral philosophy.

Governance, hubris, and justice in modern tragedy

Abstract: Hubris is a notion that has recently acquired special urgency, as it seems to express in the post-communist era the demands of justice during the tragic clash between governance and violence. This ethico-political notion deserves to be studied not only in ancient writings but in modern drama and thought as well. Nikos Kazantzakis' unduly neglected Capodistria (1944) dramatizes the dilemmas of civic action during the democratic constitution of a polity. A reading of this tragedy from the perspective of political theory suggests ways in which the meaning of hubris in modernity may be better understood.

Between Zhdanov and Bloomsbury: the Poetry and Poetics of E. P. Thompson:

Abstract: E. P. Thompson's poetry and poetics are rarely considered by commentators on his work, but they are central to his thought. Thompson, who for a long time identified as a poet rather than a historia...

A Celestial Place: Hill Gardening in a Colonial Garden City:

Abstract: Despite an assumption that Christchurch — the Garden City of New Zealand — has historically been viewed as the manifestation of a utopian dream, the experiences of the city's gardeners reveal a variety of sentiments about the meaning of gardens. Hillside gardeners, in particular, tended to see their gardens and their place in them in very different ways from their counterparts on the flat. These hillside gardens were places that allowed for an explicit appreciation of internationalism, localism, and an often spiritual connection with the world at large. They were `celestial', paradisical, and I therefore argue that tropes of utopias and paradise may sit uneasily with each other in colonial discourse. This point requires further attention from historians.

Greek Exercises: the Modern Olympics as Hellenic Appropriation and Reinvention

Abstract: `From Aristotle to Us', the conference held at La Trobe University in May 2007, names a powerful and highly influential Romantic trajectory, one which posits a particular conception of the ancients, a particular conception of the moderns, and a complex conception of the relationship between the two. Using the modern Olympic Revival as a case study and a case in point, this article argues that such `exercises' in Greek appropriation always operate with largely unstated assumptions about the nature of the present's relation to the past, and the enormously complex quality of the Greek past. In becoming self-critical about such appropriations of the Classical legacy, contemporary critics are forced to contend with the spectre of religion, a topic that `Greek exercises' almost inevitably carve in high relief. The article concludes with an historiographic meditation on varying images of `paganism' in contemporary culture, images that link the Greeks to athletics to such modern and post-modern `revivals'.

The Poverty of Liberalism: the First Old Age Pensions in Australia

Abstract: The two reforms that most contributed to the idea of an antipodean social laboratory at the end of the 19th century were the old age pension and state arbitration of the minimum wage. Both are said...

The Closing of the Civic Mind: Marcel Gauchet on the `Society of Individuals':

Abstract: According to Gauchet we are living in a `society of individuals'. But a central term is missing from that formula, and not by any accident, for contemporary society has lost it from view: the term of the political. In sum, thus reads Gauchet's diagnosis, society today is haunted by a kind of individualism out of which no society can be conceived, as it obfuscates its political dimension. The aim of this article is to elaborate this diagnosis, and more specifically the idea that there is no society, and therefore no individual either, without the political. In order to do so, I will explore the meaning of the formula `society of individuals'. Within the scope of this analysis, I shall primarily pay attention to the `primacy of the political' in Gauchet. To conclude, I will assess Gauchet's diagnosis, by fathoming in what sense contemporary individualism, besides being an `eclipse of the political', is also a threat to democracy.

The Gods of Greece: Germans and the Greeks

Abstract: The German relationship to the Greeks was central to German self-understanding. It defined German identity culturally through the exclusion of democracy from the idealized image of Greece and through the emphasis on Greek originality that served to devalue the Roman, Latin and Renaissance translations of the Greek heritage. Hostility to the legacy of the Latin spirit, to legal thought and to rationality, reinforced the German rejection of French intellectual and cultural hegemony. These German fictions about the Greeks were closely linked with reflections on modernity, the death of the Christian God and a disenchanted Cartesian universe. They led Nietzsche and Heidegger to more `original' interpretations of the Greeks as the source of German rebirth.

Nature's God: Emerson and the Greeks

Abstract: This article explores the mystical impulse in the American mind, reflected in the work of William James, Kenneth Burke, and most especially the case of Ralph Waldo Emerson. The parallels and differences between Emerson's mystical idea of Nature and the ancient Greek pre-Socratic idea of the universe as a union of opposites are explored. The divergence between the Americans and the Greeks concerning the idea of limits is reflected on. The optimism of the Americans is explained as a function of their mystical theodicy, and the greatness of their power as a function of their mystic ability, so well assayed by Emerson, to bear crushing paradoxes with a cheerful lightness of being

The Greek Foundations of the West

Abstract: This article returns to the question of the foundations of Western culture. Many have trod this path before, notably Nietzsche. At issue is a theory of culture, and the classical Greek preoccupation with how humans can make sense of their lives, find direction and some sort of vindication — for that is what culture is, and does. Travelling Greece today, what surprises is the vitality of the ancient sites. Alive with their own cast of timeless enchantment, it is as if they haven't changed over the millennia. Has this miraculous, enduring vitality something to do with the fact that the Western tree that Greece seeded continues to flourish? Or, is this just romantic illusion, a way to redeem the prosaic orders of modern everyday life; or, a fantasy aesthetico-religious culture to populate the disenchanted ruins of the Christian churchyard?

The Social Sciences in Australia: an Unrequited Instrumentalism

Abstract: Australian universities expanded rapidly in the period after the Second World War, assisted by the national government and with a clear understanding that they would serve national purposes. Social scientists sought to participate in the enhanced opportunities for research by pressing their relevance to the nation-building project. At the same time they sought academic recognition as research disciplines by stressing the objective and authoritative character of their knowledge. This article explores the way these strategies were pursued in Australia and the United States, and suggests their consequences. The institutionalization of the social sciences in the university is contrasted with the oppositional social science practised in the labour movement's independent working-class education in the early part of the 20th century, and it is argued that the expectations created by state support of research in the social sciences — and the policies imposed to serve them — are ill founded.

Aristotle and Us: Some Observations on His Philosophical Language

Abstract: The study discusses Aristotle's special use of Greek language as a historical construct defined by the need to accommodate the communicative needs of an expanding world (morphoplastic synapses). It addresses the paradoxical synthesis of Platonic idealism and empirical cognition which is expressed in his philosophical language and detects a deep incommensurability in their structural form. It argues that such conflict of paradigms in the work of Aristotle neutralized the interpretive potential of Greek language which focused on commentaries over a long period of time. Aristotle's thinking became important in Thomas Aquinas' philosophical summa by establishing a creative synthesis through the potentialities of Latin. The semantic neutralization of Greek continued until the 20th century when Cornelius Castoriadis proposed a new Aristotelian synthesis by re-interpreting his principle of imagination within a modern understanding of creativity.