Some Notes From Collishaw

The whole key is education, 'cause if not, in another 200 years, the only blackfellas that'll be alive are the educated ones. Because the uneducated, with all their social problems, will die. Capitalism won't stop and wait for you. 'Hey catch up to us, Jack.' It'll just keep going. And that's the way of the world.'

The opening quote introduces some now-familiar concepts:

·      Progress (it won’t stop and wait for you… that's the way of the world)

·      Education

·      Capitalism

Are juxtaposed with:

·      the uneducated, with all their social problems

Think back to Hobsbawm’s discussion last week:

“The nineteenth-century liberal ideology of social change”, with its emphasis on radical innovation, was characterised by:

·      deliberately not using or adapting the old ways

·      systematically setting itself against tradition,

·      expressing a general hostility to irrationalism, superstition and customary practices reminiscent of the dark past.

We can see from this:

·      The enlightenment continues to shape the way we view ourselves and our position in the world (our “social reality” - Gross).

So, starting with this weeks reading we know that it is not about what is and/or is not “traditional” or “authentic”, so much as the processes associated with the defining the authentic as authentic. The article’s principal question is: Who gets to say what is and is not “authentic”. In this respect it resonates with the readings on “invented traditions” from last week.

Wordle based on Kant and Public Reasoning

Wordle Based on "The Enlightenment and modernity and meanings of the modern"

Wordle based on "Traditional, modern and postmodern perspectives on Australia Day"

Wordle based on "Rethinking Tradition" readings (week 4)

Wordle based on Postmodern readings

Kant, Public Reason and Damien Hooper's T-Shirt

Earlier in the semester, in the context of Kant's analysis of Public Reason, there was a discussion about whether or not it was appropriate for boxer Damien Hooper to wear non-regulatoin clothing in the form of an Aboriginal Flag t-shirt.  In an analysis of the event, Alex McAulay, writing in the Socialist Alternative, argued:

The rank hypocrisy of Hooper’s censure is put into relief by the constant celebration of all things British at the Games. The opening ceremony was an epic three and a half hour whitewash of history’s bloodiest colonial empire which was widely applauded as an “irreverent, but never disrespectful” celebration of the “quirky” Brits. Damien Hooper’s celebration of his people’s survival of a genocide initiated by Britain flies in the face of this cosy image."

Hooper's actions are perhaps not as important as the intellectual histories that we draw on to explain whether he was correct or incorrect.

Week Three - Hobsbawm and White

Hobsbawm cites a distinct shift in the nature of tradition that roughly coincides with the timeframe discussed last week. He talks about the “marked difference between old and invented [traditions]

1. Where the old ways are alive, traditions need be neither revived nor invented.

2. What happens to traditions under the auspices of modernity?

• Yet it may be suggested that where they are invented, it is often not because old ways are no longer available or viable, but because they are deliberately not used or adapted. Thus, in consciously setting itself against tradition and for radical innovation, the nineteenth-century liberal ideology of social change systematically failed to provide for the social and authority ties taken for granted in earlier societies, and created voids which might have to be filled by invented practices. (Hobsbawm, p. 8)

3. Invented traditions

 However Traditions do persist. As Hobsbawm (p. 2) argues:

·      Traditions are responses to novel situations – to the constant change and innovation of the modern world

·      Traditions attempt to structure at least some parts of social life within it as unchanging and invariant. 

·      Traditions take the form of reference to old situations (to a historic past), or they establish their own past by quasi-obligatory repetition. 

·      The peculiarity of 'invented' traditions is that the continuity with the historic past which is referenced is largely factitious. 

4. Main Example of Invented Tradition

Hobsbawm (p. 10-11)

• One marked difference between old and invented practices may be observed. The former were specific and strongly binding social practices, the latter tended to be quite unspecific and vague as to the nature of the values, rights and obligations of the group membership they inculcate: 'patriotism', 'loyalty', 'duty', 'playing the game', 'the school spirit' and the like. But if the content of British patriotism or 'Americanism' was notably ill-defined, though usually specified in commentaries associated with ritual occasions, the practices symbolizing it were virtually compulsory -as in standing up for the singing of the national anthem in Britain, the flag ritual in American schools. The crucial element seems to have been the invention of emotionally and symbolically charged signs of club membership rather than the statutes and objects of the club. Their significance lay precisely in their undefined universality.

White (p. 15)

• Of course, the idea of nation is an enormously powerful one, powerful enough for people to die in its name. Its very imprecision is its power. But it is not the same as the nation-state, which clearly defines its boundaries, its members, its power. The idealised nation is in many ways an invention, an artificial construction, rather than an expression of an underlying essence that all members of a particular  nation share. (15)

4. White (p. 17-18) on the way we can and should understand/analyze "invented traditions".

• My point is that there are realities-social, cultural, geographical-but when it comes to naming even the simplest realities 'Australian' we get into difficulties because we are inevitably touching on questions of power and identity. And this brings us to the concerns of this book: how do questions of nationality and culture touch on the issues of multiple identities and the agency of ordinary Australians? 

• If the idea of 'Australia' is an invention, an active and creative process rather than something that has a prior existence and simply needs to be discovered, then it follows that it will be invented and embroidered in different ways by different people for different reasons. This could be taken to mean that there is no single Australian identity but only multiple identities. Even when Inventing Australia was being written, with multiculturalism being formally adopted as a national cultural policy, this idea was not all that new. Nevertheless, Inventing Australia probably contributed to the process by which the notion of a single monolithic national identity-as portrayed for example in Russel Ward's The Australian Legend-was increasingly discredited through the 1970s and 1980s. It was a battle that still had to be fought in the lead-up to the bicentennial celebrations, and while there was a strong backlash against the Bicentennary, and the Bicentennial Authority's commitment to pluralism might have been as much strategic as heartfelt, multiple identities were recognised in 'Celebration of the Nation' (Spearritt 1988; Cochrane & Goodman 1988). 

• In Inventing Australia my concern with multiple Australian identities was with their multiplicity over time. Despite Melleuish's comment that 'a cursory examination of White's national images demonstrates that they are all quite similar' (1995, p. 9), I would suggest a slightly less cursory examination might show that they changed considerably over time, ranging from hell to paradise (which raises concerns about Melleuish's eschatology), from an Australia based in the bush to one found in suburbia, and, important in Melleuish's own work, from 'free trade' notions of Australia to protectionist ones. In examining that series of conceptions of Australia, I only considered those I judged to be dominant at anyone time. I regret that I was not able to give more attention to alternative conceptions of Australia competing with the dominant ones, nor to the actual processes of dissemination by which some conceptions carne to dominate. However, I did establish that there was a contest for supremacy going on among the different conceptions of Australia, and that contest was part of the wider struggles for dominance within Australian society. One problem with the bicentennial gloss of multiple identities, and of much public commitment to multiculturalism, is its tendency to leave out of the equation the contest for dominance in the public discourse of nation. All multiple identities are seen as equal, when in fact some are more equal than others.

Week 2- Recap- Gascoigne and Gross

Last week Gascoigne and Gross defined the changes associated with the Enlightenment in terms of:

• The scientific revolution of the seventeenth century
• The Industrial revolution
• The Agrarian revolution
• The rise of early capitalism
• Empiricism and rationalism
• The rise of rational institutions of governance
• a bureaucratised, centralised government
• the rule of law
• The rise of modern political ideologies: liberalism, communism, socialism (Hobsbawm)

The totality of these changes can be understood in terms of the shift from tradition to the modern. Gascoigne defines the Enlightenment as “a movement which directly challenged many aspects of traditional practice”.

What does this shift from the  traditional to the modern entail?

Tradition can be defined as that which is pre-existing. However there is also a more specific definition:

Gross writes: 

• Almost all the important elements of a traditional attitude are expressed here: that the old ways are the best; that value is found by following the old paths; that comfort and peace come by holding on to the legacies of the past; and that "the past" and "the good" are for all practical purposes one and the same Tradition encouraged attitudes of piety and reverence toward what was inherited from the past. It affirmed the notion that one had to look backward toward some distant origin to find the source of all value. Thus, the essential quality of tradition is its conservatism. It produced respect for authority.
• Compared with tradition’s backward orientation, modernity entailed a belief in progress, a belief that the future would be better and more prosperous than the past. This belief or confidence in the future was inspired by new methods of scientific and intellectual inquiry such as empiricism and rationalism. Gascoigne writes: The view that society could be improved through the application of reason and industry gave direction to the new settlements and linked their endeavours with the faith in progress that was a keynote of the Enlightenment.

Thus “tradition” and “modernity” can each be understood as a general approach to the world, an attitude of mind, a “social reality” (Gross).

The readings for this week, Gascoigne and Gross disuss some of the momentous changes that took place in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. These changes were associated with events such as the scientific revolution, the industrial revolution, and the agrarian revolution and the rise of empiricism, rationalism and early capitalism.

The changes assocaited with these events can be understood in terms of the the shift from tradition to modenrity. Tradition and modenrity are both key concepts in relation to your essays.

The class disucussion is seeking to explain this shift (from tradition to modernity) in terms of changing orienation towards the notion of time. In particular it seeks to compare and contrast tradition's orintation towards the past with modernity's orientation towards the future.

Provide some contemporary examples

1. Tradition
Gascoigne on Tradition

• Entrenched form of discourse
• Containment of change

Gross on Tradition

• By following tradition backward from an impoverished "now" to a rich and plentiful "then," one could gain access to the time of creation (p. 2)
• Almost all the important elements of a traditional attitude are expressed here: that the old ways are the best; that value is found by following the old paths; that comfort and peace come by holding on to the legacies of the past; and that "the past" and "the good" are for all practical purposes one and the same (p.1)

2. Gascoigne and Gross on key changs that took place in the seventeenth and eighteenth century

• The Industrial Revolution, however, set in motion processes which permanently altered social reality.

industrialism induced people to let go of tradition in the interest of new constructions.

The scientific revolution of the seventeenth century

Industrial revolution

Agrarian revolution

Enlightenment, bureaucratisation, the rule of law, the rise of rational institutions of governance- Gasc, Gebder

Empiricism and rationalism

Early capitalism

Centralised / absolutist state

Industrial revolution

3. Modernity

• Improvement

  Progress meant a willingness to accept change for future advantage and a confidence that the application of reason would ultimately mean a better world

  Renoval of impediments (Adam Smith)

  ·         the idea that it was possible literally to "begin again"
• The view that society could be improved through the application of reason and industry

   

In the seventeenth century, however, the idea that it was possible literally to "begin again" was seriously entertained for the first time. Moreover, it came to be assumed that if a second beginning occurred, it could actually be superior to the first one if it managed to wipe away the shortcomings of the original.

 

Week 2: The Enlightenment and modernity and meanings of the modern

Readings:

Gascoigne, J. 2002, The Enlightenment and the origins of European Australia, Cambridge University Press, Port Melbourne, Victoria, pp1-16.

Gross, D. 1992, The past in ruins: tradition and the critique of modernity, The University of Massachusetts Press, Massachusetts, pp 20-40.

Kant and the Meaning of the Public Reason

The tutorial started with three questions:

·         What does Kant mean by Public Reason?

·         How is it different from Private Reason?

·         Why is it so important?

1. We identified the key sentence or passage where Kant talked about the meaning of public reason.

2. We talked, talk about a site, space or place that embodies this notion of public reason in some way shape or form...

The results:

Kant on private reason.

·         I call the private use of reason that which a person may make in a civic post or office that has been entrusted to him.

·         Thus an appointed teacher’s use of his reason for the sake of his congregation is merely private, because, however large the congregation is, this use is always only domestic; in this regard, as a priest, he is not free and cannot be such because he is acting under instructions from someone else

Kant on Public Reasoning

• Reason not governed by any official post
•  prescribes nothing
•  allows men complete freedom
• By the public use of one’s own reason I refer to the way anyone who regards himself
• Insofar as this part of the machine also regards himself as a member of the community community as a whole, or even of the world community as a whole, or even of the world community, and as a consequence addresses the public
• in the role of a scholar, in the proper sense of that term, he can most certainly argue, without thereby harming the affairs for which as a passive member he is partly responsible.
• Reason not governed by any official post
• Public reason involves using  his own rational capacities and to speak his own mind.
• Free from immaturity   

What are some examples of a space, place or installation that embodies this kind of puhblic reasoning today?

1. Street art

2. Blog / internet

• Wikipedia – collaborative and accountability
• Youtube- face book, blogging

3. Where is street art “left alone”

4. Local community forums

·         council meeting

·         public library

·         speakers corner- who sanctions speakers corner

·         Communioty garden

5. Bars and/or pubs/clubs

Comedy

6. Collaborative capitalism

·         Car sharing- Go Get

·         Collaborative online shopping.

• Festival of dangerous ideas
• Controversial example: The recent Aboriginal Boxer at the olympic games who wore an aboriginal flag
• Universities- oppressive governance versus free speach..