School of Culture & Communication Research Seminars
These seminars are free of charge and open to all staff, students and members of the public. No RSVP necessary.
Wednesdays, 4.30-5.30 pm
Theatre C,
Old Arts Building (NB new venue for Semester 2)
The papers last 40-50 minutes, and are followed by informal discussion. Students are most welcome to attend, and to offer papers or suggest visiting speakers. Details of the program are also circulated by email.
Program: Semester 1, 2008
Select a speaker's name to see abstract and biographical note.
Week |
Date |
Speaker |
1 |
5 March |
Colin Duckworth, '"Transladaptation": From French novels to English Plays' |
2 |
12 March |
Paul Monaghan, 'Aristotle on theatre and teleology: what he did and didn't say, and what he might have meant by it' |
3 |
19 March |
Shelley Meagher, 'Irish writers and Islam in the early nineteenth century' |
Easter Non-Teaching Period: Good Friday 21 March - Friday 30 March 2008 |
||
4 |
2 April |
Peter Otto, 'Minds, Bodies and Virtual Reality in Bentham's panopticon machine' |
5 |
9 April |
Paul Magee, 'Suddenness: on rapid knowledge' |
6 |
16 April |
John Frow, 'An ethics of imitation' |
7 |
23 April |
Kate MacNeill, 'Pina Bausch and the materiality of artistic labour' |
8 |
30 April |
Kevin Brophy, 'In the ear of the mind: on speaking, thinking, and creativity' |
9 |
7 May |
Bronwyn Hughes, 'For God, King and Country: Australia's Stained Glass War Memorials' |
10 |
14 May |
Sean Cubitt, 'Geek theory' |
11 |
21 May |
Justin Clemens, "Symptoms of the new science in Paradise Lost" |
12 |
28 May | Marion Campbell, "Playing Politics in Milton’s Paradise Lost" |
|
4 June |
Ihab Hassan, "Art and Theory in the Global Age: The Role of Trust" |
Program: Semester 2, 2008
Select a speaker's name to see abstract and biographical note.
Biographies and Abstracts
Tony Bennett, ‘Counting and seeing the social action of literary form’
This paper reviews Franco Moretti’s use of statistical forms of analysis and techniques for visualising the action of literary forms with a view to assessing their implications for the development of cultural sociology. It places Moretti’s use of such methods in comparative perspective by comparing them with the work of Bourdieu, contrasting the principles of sociological analysis developed by Bourdieu with Moretti’s preoccupation with the analysis of literary form. The protocols he proposes for this are illustrated by examining his accounts of the development of the English novel and the role of clues in the development of detective stories. His attempt to use evolutionary principles of explanation to account for the development of literary forms is probed by considering its similarities to earlier evolutionary accounts of the development of design traits. While welcoming Moretti’s work for the significant methodological initiative it represents, its lack of an adequate account of the role of literary institutions is criticised as are the effects of the forms of abstraction that his analyses rest upon.
Tony Bennett is Professor of Sociology at the Open University, a Director of the Economic and Social Science Research Centre on Socio-Cultural Change, and a Professorial Fellow in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Melbourne. He is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. His publications include Formalism and Marxism; Outside Literature; Bond and Beyond: The Political Career of a Popular Hero (with Janet Woollacott); The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics; Culture: A Reformer’s Science; Accounting for Tastes: Australian Everyday Cultures (with Michael Emmison and John Frow); and, most recently, Pasts Beyond Memory: Evolution, Museums, Colonialism; New Keywords: A Revised Vocabulary of Culture and Society (edited with Larry Grossberg and Meaghan Morris), and The Sage Handbook of Cultural Analysis (edited with John Frow).
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Barbara Bolt, 'Whose Joy? Giotto, Yves Klein and Neon Blue Abstract'
This paper investigates the intertwining of the physical, the psychical and the social in the apprehension and experience of colour. It draws together Kristeva’s analysis of the operations of the triple register of colour as it is developed in her essay ‘Giotto’s Joy’ (1980) and Yves Klein’s perceptual approach to painting in order to propose a rethinking of realism as a material realism; not one that is grounded in mimesis, but one that is arises out of the body and a rethinking of perceptual approaches to the Real. The essay draws implications of Kristeva’s explication of the triple register to propose that the economy of the triple register provides the mechanism through which the Real insinuates and effects the ruin of representation. It argues that the triple register offers a site where we can begin to refigure a “new realism”.
Barbara Bolt is a senior lecturer in the VCA Graduate School at the Victorian College of the Arts. She is a practicing artist who has also written extensively on the visual arts and its relationship to philosophy. Her publications include a monograph Art Beyond Representation: The Performative Power of the Image (I.B.Tauris, 2004) and two edited publications, Practice as Research: Approaches to Creative Arts Enquiry (I.B.Tauris, 2007) with Estelle Barrett and Sensorium: Aesthetics, Art, Life (Cambridge Scholars Press, 2007) with Felicity Coleman, Graham Jones and Ashley Woodward. She is currently working on a book Heidegger Reframed, part a series written specifically for visual arts students. Her essays have been published in edited books including Differential Aesthetics: Art Practices and Philosophies: Towards New Feminist Understandings (Ashgate, 2001) Penny Florence and Nicola Foster (eds) and Unframed: The Practices and Politics of Women's Painting (I.B.Tauris, 2004) Rosemary Betterton (ed.) and in refereed journals such as Hypatia, Womens Philosophical Review, Studies in Material Thinking, Working Papers in Art and Design, Cultural Review and Social Semiotics. As an arts writer, she has also been published in Australian art magazines including Artlink, Eyeline, Craftswest and Real Time. She is on the editorial board of the online journals Creative Approaches to Research (RMIT) and Material Thinking (AUT). Website http://www.barbbolt.com/
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Kevin Brophy, 'In the ear of the mind: on speaking, thinking, and creativity'
Kevin will read from his new poetry collection, Mr Wittgenstein's Lion (Five Islands Press, 2007; reviewed in April's Australian Book Review, and the March posting of Australian Poetry Review at http://www.australianpoetryreview.com.au/ ). His reading will be interspersed with excursions into research and philosophical inquiries into creativity, intention, consciousness, and accidental thinking. He will be responding to Ross Hamilton's recent study Accident: A Philosophical and Literary History (2007), John Searle's Mind: a brief introduction (2004), Heinrich von Kleist's 1805 essay, 'On the Gradual Production of Thoughts Whilst Speaking', C. K. Williams' 1998 essay, 'Poetry and Consciousness', and Paul Ricoeur's observations on the 'shambles of the theory of imagination today' (Rethinking Imagination, 1994).
Kevin Brophy is the author of ten books, including four collections of poetry, four works of fiction and two books of essays on creative writing.
Books published
2007 Mr Wittgenstein's Lion (Five Islands Press)
2006 What Men and Women Do (Flat Chat Press)
2003 Explorations in Creative Writing (MUP)
2002 Portrait in Skin (Five Islands Press)
1998 Creativity: Psychoanalysis, Surrealism and Creative Writing (MUP)
1997 Seeing Things (Five Islands Press)
1992 Replies to the Questionnaire on Love (Five Islands Press)
1991The Hole Through the Centre of the World (Simon & Schuster)
1989 Visions (Angus & Robertson)
1982 Getting Away With It (Wildgrass Books)
Marion Campbell, "Playing Politics in Milton’s Paradise Lost "
Milton's Paradise Lost has long been recognised as a deeply topical poem, which continues to engage with the specificities of time and place even while investigating the philosophical meanings of temporality and location. This paper looks at the ways in which the streets and buildings of Milton's London are represented in Paradise Lost, and how they are used in mapping certain key events and places associated with those rival regimes which impinged significantly on its composition: the English Commonwealth and the Royal Restoration.
Marion Campbell teaches and researches in the field of seventeenth-century English Literature in the School of Culture and Communication, University of Melbourne.
Justin Clemens, "Symptoms of the new science in Paradise Lost"
John Milton's epic poem Paradise Lost is in many ways a response to one of the great epistemological ruptures in human history, that of the emergence of post-Galilean science. Yet the history of the interpretation of Paradise Lost has seen only inconsistent and uncertain attention given to the topic. If commentary has often emphasized Paradise Lost as a great epic work in a predominantly literary tradition; a theologico-political rewriting of Biblical and classical tropes; an encyclopaedic philosophical essay on abiding problems of free-will and history, and so on, it has never taken on the full force of the scientific revolution, nor its impact upon the writing, publication, and reception of the poem. Evidence of this neglect is legible in the non-appearance of the category of 'science' in almost all of the introductory and companion texts to Milton. It is the impact of the scientific revolution on Milton's thought that I wish to examine here, primarily through a reading of the references to Galileo's telescope in the poem.
Justin Clemens is Senior Lecturer in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne. He has recently collaborated with Christopher Dodds and Adam Nash on 'Babelswarm', an ongoing art project in the online environment Second Life. With Nick Heron and Alexander Murray, he is the editor of an anthology on the work of the philosopher Giorgio Agamben, forthcoming from Edinburgh University Press. He is currently working with Marion Campbell on the relationships between science and politics in Paradise Lost.
Liz Conor, '"Black Velvet": Sexual Labour in Colonial Visualities'
The 'Black Velvet' trope has its antecedent in the exoticism of the 'Native Belle' figure which appears in early explorer, traveller and settler first contact scenarios. 'Black Velvet' emerged under the massive pastoral and mining expansion into remote areas and was dismissed as a necessary evil in terrain unpopulated by white women. This frontier typology incorporated a notion of the racialised woman as a 'comfort' woman - providing sexual and domestic labour where white women's more fragile constitutions made them anomalous to the harsh Australian frontier. It also reflected on the status of Aboriginal women who were seen to be exchanged as prostitutes by their men for 'a stick of tobacco'. But if the feminine presence of Aboriginal women maintained gender distinctions, the nature of their labour as stationhands and stockwomen also challenged them. This confusion of the categories of gender, race and class made Aboriginal women discursively liminal creating the conditions for a type - 'black velvet' - which would divest them of maternity, and pin down the mutable meanings of black women living and labouring with white men in the outback.
Liz Conor has recently completed an Australian Research Council postdoctoral fellow in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne. She is the author of The Spectacular Modern Woman: Feminine Visibility in the 1920s (Indiana University Press, 2004), former editor of Metro Magazine and Australian Screen Education and has published essays and freelance articles in many Australian journals and newspapers.
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Sean Cubitt, 'Geek Theory'
On the one hand, thinkers as diverse as Adorno and Latour have condemned the tendency towards abstraction implicit in Western thought. On the other, the attempt to pursue a materialist analysis of the physical objects of media tends towards an unfashionable antiquarianism. Researching a relatively straightforward object - Disney's cartoon The Band Concert of 1935 for example - turns up a nest of detail intricately interwoven technologies and techniques, precisely the capillaries that Foucault gestured towards. But any statement about the use of gum arabic, nitrate stock and azo dyes, however specific, fails to yield the expected load of significance unless it is accompanied by a theorising pass. In this paper I hope to exemplify and problematise the passage between these levels of analysis through an analysis of the technical production and archival afterlife of this cartoon.
Sean Cubitt is Director of the Program in Media and Communications at the University of Melbourne. His publications include Timeshift: On Video Culture, Videography: Video Media as Art and Culture, Digital Aesthetics,Simulation and Social Theory, The Cinema Effect and EcoMedia. He is the series editor for Leonardo Books at MIT Press. His current research is on public screens and the transformation of public space; and on genealogies of digital light. This paper is a draft of a keynote address to the Animation Studies Association in Bournemouth in July 2008, and draws on research for the forthcoming book Glory - The Practice of Light.
Colin Duckworth, ''Transladaptation': From French novels to English Plays'
Having adapted Ionesco's Le Roi Se Meurt into an opera libretto (A King No more), in 2005, Colin Duckworth was invited by the Stork Hotel, an active cultural venue, to adapt Camus' first novel, L'Etranger, for the stage. His version, The Misfit, was so successful with audiences and critics that he was commissioned to "transladapt" in rapid succession Camus' La Peste (Plague), Proust's A La Recherche Du Temps Perdu (Marcel and Albertine), and Marguerite Duras' L'amant and L'amant De La Chine Du Nord (The Lover). All of these had extended runs and excellent reviews. Consequently, he is at present working on Flaubert's Madame Bovary (Who Killed Emma Bovary?) for production in April/May, and Les Liaisons Dangereuses (in French) for September. This talk will outline each novel and the different challenges each one presented for the creative process of adaptation from narrative discourse to dramatic form for only one or two actors. There will be video extracts.
Colin Duckworth is an Emeritus Professor and Professorial Fellow in the School of Languages, Melbourne Uni, specialising in French literature and French/English drama since the 18th century (especially Voltaire and Beckett). He has also worked as a book and theatre reviewer, professional actor and director, and has had three novels published.
Simon During, 'Completing secularism: living the mundane in the neo-liberal era'
This paper uses a brief critique of Charles Taylor's A Secular Age to examine the concept of the mundane and to develop the concept of endgame capitalism. It further uses a brief reading of Alan Hollingworth's The Line of Beauty to describe certain relations between the mundane and contemporary democratic state capitalism.
Simon During is Professor of English at Johns Hopkins. He gained his PhD from Cambridge in 1983 and subsequently joined the English Department at Melbourne where he served as Chair; Inaugural Director of the Media and Communications Program and Inaugural Co-ordinator of Cultural Studies. He has published in postcolonial theory, Australian, British and New Zealand cultural and literary history, cultural studies and literary theory, and his work has been translated into eleven languages. His books include Foucault and Literature (1993), Patrick White (1996) and Modern Enchantments: the cultural power of secular magic (2002). He is currently completing a book entitled Culture's interests: literary institutions in the secular state.
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Peter Eckersall, ‘Avant-garde bodies: Zero Jigen enter Tokyo'
Zero Jigen (Zero Dimension), active in 1960s Japan, were known for their ‘ritual’ street performances (gishiki), surreal imagery and public nudity. Yet, they defied categorisation and had an ambivalent relationship to Japan’s 1960s avant-garde underground. This paper will explore the notion of avant-garde bodies in relation to public space in 1960s Japan through an analysis of Zero Jigen performances. The paper will examine Zero Jigen’s radical understanding of the contemporary city as meeting between body and space. Accordingly, intersubjectivity and metamorphosis are possible; the individual body is lost to the flows of the capitalist transformations of Tokyo. It will be argued that through these performances, ranging from uncanny walks along crowded streets to politically motivated parodies of street demonstrations, Zero Jigen carved new perspectives of radical alterity.
Peter Eckersall teaches Theatre Studies at The University of Melbourne. He is author of Theorising the Angura Space: avant-garde performance and politics in Japan 1960-2000 (Brill Academic, 2006) and numerous essays on Japanese theatre and contemporary performance. He is co-editor of Performance Paradigm journal.
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John Frow, 'An ethics of imitation'
In March 1997 I became an unwilling participant in a controversy over Graham Swift's novel Last Orders which had won the Booker Prize the previous year. A letter of mine in an Australian magazine criticising the novel's unspoken reliance on Faulkner's As I Lay Dying was picked up in the English press and turned into an accusation of plagiarism. For me that wasn't the issue, but the controversy raised a number of questions that I want to explore here. What uses may one text make of another? Where is the line to be drawn between plagiarism, imitation, adaptation, repetition, and originality, and on what grounds and under what institutional circumstances do we draw it? These are questions about judgements of aesthetic value, and they spill over into ethical and, at the extreme, into legal questions. I try to spell out some answers which take into account the changing nature of the contract binding writer to reader.
John Frow is Professor of English Language and Literature at the University of Melbourne. He is the author of Marxism and Literary History (1986); Cultural Studies and Cultural Value (1995); Time and Commodity Culture (1997); Accounting for Tastes: Australian Everyday Cultures (with Tony Bennett and Michael Emmison, 1999); and Genre (2006). A Handbook of Cultural Analysis, co-edited with Tony Bennett, will appear this year.
Paul Hamilton, 'Realpoetik: Romantic Europe as a Political Idea'
Edmund Burke, Novalis and Chateaubriand all articulated their political ideals through images depicting an older Christian Europe. Reflections on the Revolution in France, Die Christenheit oder Europa, and Le génie du christianisme are perhaps most easily read as nostalgic, mystifying or reactionary, with the accompanying assumption that the kind of political thinking involved is quite transparently conservative. At the same time, the aesthetic qualities of Christianization are often taken to incriminate the aesthetic itself and tie it to purposes that are transparently ideological. Romantic republicanism, though, is unusually versatile, and crosses the usually definitive boundaries of left and right. In writers as intellectually mobile as these the general dilemma of living in a Europe soon to be re-invented at the Congress of Vienna in the wake of Napoleon’s ‘code’ arguably provoked an experimental response rather than the rehearsal of straightforwardly prescribed political frameworks. As Biancamaria Fontana describes it, "From now on the European identity would no longer reside in shared traditions, in religious and cultural affinities. It had become a distinctive political reality, the privileged framework within which single nations had to find their place and a mode of coexistence." (128)
In other words, the political reality post-1814 dictates to us the kind of human nature, its defining freedoms and individual scope that will be permitted, rather than resting on those for its own legitimacy. Kant’s and Herder’s ideals are no longer what political reality claims to represent; instead, ideals only retain credibility insofar as they are represented in the new Europe. This paper, then, investigates the kind of Realpoetik rather than Realpolitik this implies.
Paul Hamilton is Professor of English at Queen Mary College in the University of London. An internationally-renowned scholar in Romantic Theory, Professor Hamilton is the author of many books, the most recent of which is Meta-Romanticism. He is a 2008 Arts Faculty Visiting Scholar.
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Ihab Hassan, "Art and Theory in the Global Age: The Role of Trust"
In an interactive, hybrid, pluralist, and conflictual age, what are the possibilities of aesthetics, of art and literary theory? How can pragmatic generalizations be made? The paper argues for an epistemic and aesthetic compact, derived from self-dispossesion, founded on trust.
Ihab Hassan, who has pioneered postmodernism, received two Guggenheim and three Fulbright fellowships, and was awarded honorary degrees from Uppsala and Giessen, is the author of fifteen books, including The Postmodern Turn, and the memoirs Out of Egypt and Between the Eagle and the Sun. He has published short fiction in many literary journals.
Jeanette Hoorn, tbc
Abstract coming
Jeanette Hoorn [bio coming].
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Bronwyn Hughes, 'For God, King and Country: Australia's stained glass war memorials'
Even before the first Gallipoli casualties were reported from Gallipoli after 25 April 1915, the commemoration of World War I servicemen was embraced by individuals and communities across Australia to honour family members, friends and colleagues who gave their lives for God, King and Country in a just and noble cause. Prominent were the numerous civic monuments erected in town squares, halls, parks and at intersections; less well-known were many hundreds of stained glass memorial windows, commissioned by families and congregations as personal and community tributes to the fallen.
This paper compares the iconography of public monuments and memorial stained glass windows and examines the strong links between religion, Australian nationhood and Empire during this period. It also explores the gradual change in attitudes that took place over the inter-War period, which resulted in new iconographic references that emerged in the 1920s and flourished in the new aggregation of stained glass memorials after World War II.
Bronwyn Hughes recently completed her PhD thesis entitled 'Designing Stained Glass for Australia 1887-1927: the art and professional life of William Montgomery', that examined the intertwining of art and enterprise inherent in this branch of the decorative arts. This research emerged from her long-standing interest in glass art as a maker, teacher and researcher. Bronwyn lectures in history, design and conservation of stained glass at Holmesglen and is regularly consulted by architects and heritage organisations on glass in historic buildings. She is currently leading a small team of researchers in the preparation of the first encyclopedia of Australian stained glass makers.
Eugen Koh, 'The Nature of the Created Object and its Curatorial Implications'
This paper will examine the nature of the created object through psychoanalytic and philosophical perspectives and explore a range of possible curatorial implications. These explorations have arisen out of work at the Cunningham Dax Collection over the past 5 years in an attempt to develop a multi-dimensional approach to the creative works by people who have experienced mental illness and/or trauma.
Dr Eugen Koh is the Director of the Cunningham Dax Collection. He is a Consultant Psychiatrist at St Vincent's Hospital and a psychoanalytic psychotherapist in private practice. He holds the position of Senior Lecturer in Art in Mental Health, in the Department of Psychiatry, University of Melbourne, and has an active art practice as a painter.
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Kate MacNeill, 'Pina Bausch and the materiality of artistic labour'
The creative industries policy framework has focused attention on artistic activity as a means by which intellectual property is produced: ideas are reduced to material forms, the economic value of which derives from dealing in the rights to reproduction or performance of the work. In this paper I argue that the emphasis on "intellectual" property ignores the embodied nature of much artistic practice. Using the example of contemporary dance and in particular the tanztheater of Pina Bausch, I attempt to locate this practice within various formulations of the nature of labour activity itself. These theoretical framings of labour include Marx's "non-productive" labour, Taylorism's "machine labour" and the concept of "creative labour", popularized by Ned Rossiter and others. This paper is offered as a contribution to the creative industries debate; a contribution that seeks to value artistic labour and practice alongside the artistic "product". It is a work-in-progress; in preparation for a paper to be delivered to the Cultural Economics conference in Boston in June of this year.
Kate MacNeill is a lecturer in the Arts Management program, School of Culture and Communication, at the University of Melbourne. She has previously worked as an economist and lawyer in the government and non-government sectors and her more recent publications relate to artistic practice and the public sphere, censorship and culture and identity.
Paul Magee, "Suddenness: on rapid knowledge"
How are poetic ideas thought up? This paper is part of a broader project on the relations between poetry and knowledge. I have been interviewing contemporary Australian poets to find out how knowledge processes pertain to their work. In the process I've learnt some surprising things ' such as the fact that most of my subjects have described experiences of composing at speeds where it is simply too fast to think. Indeed, a majority have stated that rapid and un-premeditated composition is their dominant mode of producing. Of course this is not an entirely new finding, e.g. Heinrich von Kleist: 'I believe many a great speaker to have been ignorant, when he opened his mouth, of what he was going to say.' In this paper, I contrast my findings, and those of prior writers on the topic of rapid knowledge (Kleist, Wordsworth, Auden, Heidegger), with the recent neurological research of Antonio Damasio. Damasio postulates that human decision-making is in general conducted at speeds that are too fast to be fully conscious. In the process, Damasio offers interesting possibilities for hypothesising the preconscious mechanisms that poets draw upon when the words come into their heads. This, in turn, has consequences for how we theorise knowledge more generally. Knowing may be a rather more sudden process than we tend to think.
Paul Magee's most recent book was published by John Leonard Press in 2006 and is entitled Cube Root of Book. It contains the initial working out, in verse, of Paul's analyses of the moral economy of the Howard government. Academic treatments of this same material were published over 2007 in Cultural Studies Review, Text and Arena Journal. Paul is a senior lecturer in the School of Creative Communication at the University of Canberra. He is President of the Cultural Studies Association of Australasia, and has abiding interests in idleness, boredom, stagnation and revolution.
Scott McQuire, 'Googling the city'
In May 2007 global media giant Google launched 'Street Views', an application enabling users to access a digital archive of street level photographs taken across four cities in the United States. By mid-2008, the service covered over 50 US cities with many more in the pipeline. In this paper, I argue that 'Street Views' and similar services represent a significant threshold in contemporary metropolitan discourse. Beginning from the way that the invention of photography initiated new systems of 'mapping' urban space in the 19th century, reconstructing the modern city along the lines of what Allan Sekula has aptly called a 'territory of images', I will argue that 'Street Views' extends and reorients the instrumental control of the 'vision machine' in crucial ways. As the archive becomes a database accessible via distributed networks, the social relations of the image become the site of new struggles over public space.
Scott McQuire is Associate Professor in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne. His most recent book The Media City: Media, Architecture and Urban Space was published in the Theory, Culture and Society series by Sage in 2008.
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Shelley Meagher, 'Irish writers and Islam in the early nineteenth century'
Dr Shelley Meagher is a Research Fellow at the Institute of Irish Studies, Queen's University Belfast and currently holds a Short-Term Research Fellowship of the British Academy. She recently completed her PhD at Oxford University, entitled "'Islam' in Irish Poetry: Thomas Moore and the Early Union Years 1810-1846".
Paul Monaghan, 'Aristotle on theatre and teleology: what he did and didn't say, and what he might have meant by it'
In this paper I examine Aristotle's comments on tragedy/theatre in the Poetics in the context of his overall teleological philosophy. I cover what Aristotle seems to have said, what he certainly did not say, and what he might have meant by what he seems to have said. Starting from Aristotle's response to Plato's theory of Forms, and drawing on the metaphor of 'Diotima's Staircase' in Plato's Symposium, I analyse key Aristotelian terms such as mimesis, mythos (plot, the 'soul' of tragedy), opsis (commonly referred to as 'spectacle', but more accurately 'what is before the eyes') and katharsis in relation to what he suggests about the teleology of all Form/Function/Substance compounds. I will suggest that these often misunderstood terms make sense only in the context of Aristotle's teleology and his concept of ho theos ('God').
Paul Monaghan lectures in Theatre Studies in the School of Culture and Communication, and in Theatre Making at the Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne. His specialist research area is Greek and Roman Theatre in performance (in antiquity and the modern world). Paul is co-convenor/co-editor of Double Dialogues conference and journal (http://www.doubledialogues.com), co-convenor of the Dramaturgies Project, and was co-convenor of Close Relations: the Spaces of Greek and Roman Theatre, an international conference in Melbourne in September 2006 (http://www.cca.unimelb.edu.au/close). Before joining Creative Arts, Paul worked in the professional theatre industry for 16 years, in a variety of roles including actor, director, lighting designer, production and stage manager, general manager and artistic director. He has directed performances in four different languages (English, French, Indonesia & Latin), and toured to a number of countries including Japan, Bulgaria, Indonesia and Austria. He also continues to work as dramaturge for numerous emerging artists.
Peter Otto, 'Minds, Bodies and Virtual Reality in Bentham's panopticon machine'
In the more than four decades since Discipline and Punish was published studies such as Janet Semple's Bentham's Prison: A Study of the Panopticon Penitentiary (1993) have attempted to locate the panopticon in the historical context that Foucault largely neglects. Studies of the history of penal institutions have questioned the extent to which Discipline and Punish describes what actually occurs in prisons and whether disciplinary mechanisms actually proceed, through capillary action, from institutions such as the prison to the centre of society as a whole. In this paper I want to suspend these debates in order to look again at the object, Bentham's panopticon, that is at their centre. The argument proceeds, therefore, as a redescription of the panopticon. It studies its surprising relation to the virtual realities of popular entertainments, its constitution as a living machine that includes inmate, inspector and virtual reality as its key elements, and the surprising extent to which this machine claims to be able to divide itself from the points of reference (such as God and nature) that had held more traditional cultures in place. The argument concludes by returning briefly, in ways that I hope will be productive of debate, to Foucault's account of the panopticon in Discipline and Punish.
Peter Otto teaches and researches in the literatures and cultures of modernity, from Romanticism to the new media of today. His recent publications include Blake's Critique of Transcendence (2000; rpt. Oxford UP, 2006) and Entertaining the Supernatural: Mesmerism, Spiritualism, Secular Magic and Psychical Science (Adam Matthews, 2007; digital edition Feb. 2008), a large microfilm collection of texts concerned with the paranormal, secular magic and the production of illusion, published between 1700 and 1946. He is currently completing a monograph entitled Multiplying Worlds: Romanticism, Modernity and the emergence of virtual reality, which uncovers a key stage in the development of contemporary discourses of virtual reality, while also working on a new ARC-funded study on "Gothic Fiction and Imagined Worlds: Popular Literature, Emotion, and the transformation of experience in modernity". Peter Otto is the consultant editor for Adam Matthew Publishing's recently launched "Victorian Culture Portal".
David Schalkwyk, 'Hamlet's Dreams'
Starting out from Hamlet's statement that he could count himself the king of infinite space were it not that he has bad dreams and the secret circulation of a complete works of Shakespeare among prisoners on Robben Island in the 1970s, the paper explores the relationship between incarceration and subjectivity in Shakespeare's play and among prisoners on Robben Island.
David Schalkwyk is currently Professor of English at the University of Cape Town, South Africa. He has recently been appointed Director of Research at the Folger Shakespeare Library and editor of the Shakespeare Quarterly, positions he will assume from July 2009. He is the author of Speech and Performance in Shakespeare's Sonnets and Plays (CUP, 2002), Literature and the Touch of the Real (Delaware UP, 2004), and Shakespeare, Love and Service (CUP, 2008). He begins a research fellowship at the Folger Library in October, where he will be working on a study of character and agency in Shakespeare's poems and sonnets, entitled Shakespeare's Poetic Will.
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Denise Varney, 'Radical disengagement and liquid lives: Criminology by Arena Theatre Company'
This paper offers a contextual and interpretive reading of Criminology (2007) a new theatrical work whose subject matter was the ‘profoundly tragic case’ in which 26 year-old Joe Cinque was killed by his girlfriend, Anu Singh, a law student at the Australian National University. The notoriety of the case was further exacerbated by the fact that Singh served only four years of a 10-year sentence for manslaughter during which she completed her law degree and a Masters in Criminology. Criminology was conceived and directed by Rose Myers for Arena Theatre and was staged at the Malthouse Theatre, Melbourne in 2007. The text was co-written by Lally Katz and Tom Wright, with set design by Anna Tregloan and lighting by Paul Jackson.
The play’s title calls to mind the study of crime rather than a theatrical work, but it points to the creative team’s intention to both investigate and theatricalise its subject matter. Described as ‘nightmarish’ and ‘jarring’, the play set the actual case within an associative and chaotic dramatic world with a focus on the inexplicable and unassimilable that calls to mind the conditions described by Zygmunt Bauman under the metaphor of liquid modernity. The paper argues that Bauman’s sociology of liquid modernity offers an interpretive framework for analysing the state of radical disengagement that is a central theme of the play.
Denise Varney lectures in the English: Literature, Theatre and Society Program in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne. Her latest publication is an edited book Theatre in the Berlin Republic: German Drama since Reunification (Peter Lang, 2008). She is the author with Rachel Fensham of The Dolls’ Revolution: Australian Theatre and Cultural Imagination (2005).
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Anthony White, 'TV or not TV: Lucio Fontana's Luminous Images in Movement'
Lucio Fontana’s 1952 ‘Manifesto of the Spatial Movement for Television’ announced the broadcast of artistic forms through television. Although the transmission never actually took place, he did publish Luminous Images in Movement that year as an example of television art. This installation work consisted of an electric light directed at a painting punctured with holes. Images of the light’s filament, focused by the holes as if by countless pinhole lenses, were projected onto a darkened wall in the artist’s studio. In this work Fontana negotiated between the technological utopianism of the historical avant-gardes, its appropriation by 1930s Italian fascism and emerging travesty as commodity after WWII. Luminous Images in Movement evoked outmoded aesthetic practices, including baroque ceiling decorations and the magic lantern, rousing memories of the hopeful dreams of a better world produced by the fairy-tale world of early visual spectacle. At the same time, Fontana warned that the coming age of advanced spectacle ushered in by television would continue to betray its own promises.
Anthony White is a Lecturer in the School of Culture and Communication at The University of Melbourne. From 2000 - 2002 he was Curator of International Painting and Sculpture at the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra, where he curated several exhibitions, including “Jackson Pollock’s Blue Poles.” His most recent publication is “Industrial Painting’s Utopias: Lucio Fontana’s Expectations” October 124 (2008). He is currently working on a book about art and fascism in Italy.