Prophets of the beast: the modernist esotericism of D.H. Lawrence and W.B. Yeats

This thesis analyses the influence of the esoteric tradition on D.H. Lawrence and W.B. Yeats’ thought and examines both authors’ writings in light of the antidemocratic political religions that emerged during and after their respective careers. While a number of extant studies investigate the connection between modernism and the occult and a number of critics have discussed the importance of antidemocratic politics to modernism, this study is unique in its emphasis on the relationship between modernist esotericism and antidemocratic politics, and in its insistence that the interconnection between the two constitutes a fundamental part of both authors’ world-views. This study calls for the development of a multivalent understanding of modernism, which appears as neither a “cultural movement identifiable with bourgeois, capitalist, paternalist, ethnocentrist, phallocentrist, and logocentrist ideologies” (Surette 5) nor entirely the opposite; Romantic, feministic, primitivistic and countercultural. Rather, modernism will be shown to have encompassed both of these ideological orientations, effectively operating on a double front in its crusade to establish a new age. This complexity is visible in both Lawrence and Yeats’ work, as both authors advocate a return to traditional structures while simultaneously endeavouring to usher Western civilisation into a new modern paradigm. Although they primarily grounded their writings in a mythico-pastoral discourse that masked the practical implications of their revolutionary agendas, both authors possessed an attraction to Futurist thought and, albeit rarely, showed an awareness that the change they envisioned could not be brought about without a radical intervention in the political and economic sectors – an intervention that would necessarily take place through the medium of the “machine” from which they were often so adamant to distance themselves. This fusion of technophilic and Arcadian thought-currents – dubbed “archeofuturism” by the French right-wing intellectual Guillaume Faye – constitutes the central focus of this discussion of Lawrentian and Yeatsian thought.

Exhausting dance : performance and the politics of movement, by Andre Lepecki

The article reviews the book "Exhausting Dance: Performance and the Politics of Movement," by Andre Lepecki.

Secrecy and illusion : Second Life and the construction of unreality

This paper analyses the main Second Life Grid-an Internet-based business platform with dynamic social, techno-economic, sensual-aesthetic, and psychological complexities-as an example of public relations. It argues that Second Life is a more subversive, politically oriented, and powerful form of public relations, because it invisibly exploits and invades the process of the formation of public opinion. The paper argues that Australian organisations such as Telstra, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), and the Australian Film Television and Radio School (AFTRS), which lend Second Life credibility through their recruitment, need to ask critical questions about the ethical implications of promoting this market-driven cyber-illusion. The paper begins by defining public relations (Habermas, 1995, 1984, 1989; Gramsci in Storey, 2006) and investigating any links between public relations and Second Life. In particular, it investigates Second Life's defining claim that it is 'imagined, created and owned by its residents', and concludes with a series of questions that organisations seeking involvement in Second Life should consider as part of their decision-making.

Dancing and listening : Odissi across cultures

I want to take the opportunity afforded by this conference on post-colonial writing to reflect upon the oral aspects of the transmission of knowledge in a research interview.I want to view the interview as a singular event of narration. I want to use the theme or 'content' of my interview with a young Bengali-Australian dancer to draw attention tothe interview 'form'. The interview occurred because of my interest in how this dancer had come to learn Odissi dance, how knowledge of Odissi had passed to her. In retrospect, I am trying to see myself as someone to whom, through the face-to-face interview, knowledge was 'passed' orally, not textually. I am trying to think about it in terms of some of the principles of orality discussed by Walter Ong (1982), and through the concept of 'enunciation' which foregrounds not the content of a statement but the 'position of the speaking subject in the statement.'

Dance is an oral culture. It is a set of practices transmitted from body to body. You cannot learn dancing from a book. The western researcher however learns a lot about dance of other cultures from books and articles. From my own reading I have been alerted to, and become conversant with, many of the complex negotiations of gendered, historical, national, class and aesthetic meanings at work in Classical Indian Dance practices.

I learned something of the limits of literacy, however, through the experience of interviewing Sunita (not her real name) about her learning and background in Odissi dance. She has had Odissi knowledge passed on to her in a quasi-traditional guru-sisya relationship. Her authority is in her dancing - she now embodies Odissi dance in her person - and her experience is in the oral modes of transmitting dancing knowledge. Through her telling me, through remembering out loud she was reenacting or rehearsing the 'orality' of her dance knowledge.

In my conversation with Sunita, then, wasn't it a question not of what she might say about Odissi, of what discourses she might deploy, but of what she as the subject of her own enunciations might say to me? It was also a question of how I might have listened to her and what I was able to hear.

Communicating climate change: public responsiveness and matters of concern

Since climate change captured global attention in the 1990s, the private individual, addressed as a member of a concerned public, has occupied a focal position in the discourse of environmental amelioration. Recently, a range of prominent books, films and television programs — for example, Tim Flannery’s The Weather Makers (2005), Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth (2006) and ABC TV’s Carbon Cops (2007) — have promoted the role of the individual as the ‘starting point’ for effective environmental action. These texts assume that the provision and comprehension of sufficient information to the public about climate change will change individual habits and practices. This accords with the ‘information-deficit model’ in environmental communication research, a concept that asserts a direct connection between individual awareness and response, and collective action. This paper discusses the limitations of this model, pervasive in both popular and official approaches to climate change. It will interrogate the philosophical assumptions that underlie it, in which nature and culture are polarised and the human is positioned in a certain, and separate, relationship to the non-human world — an inheritance of the very logic that enables the continued exploitation of nature. Applying Bruno Latour’s notion of a ‘matter of concern’ to climate change, where the gathering of a range of irreducible forces and im/materialities continually produce these phenomena, this paper proposes that, in thinking about climate change as essentially unrepresentable, a different mode of public engagement with the issue is asserted.

ABC online : a vortal for new opportunities?

This article undertakes an analysis of the ABCs website, ABC Online -- www. abc.net.au -- to explore how the public broadcaster uses the Internet to offer new services. While recognising that the ABC aims to enhance its traditional radio and television services using the Internet, the article establishes the extent to which ABC Online also provides innovative, original, and interactive new services, including those with no connection to traditional radio and television programs, as is often demanded by audiences. This article examines the capacity for ABC Online to develop a unique and distinctive role via the Internet through the potential to offer novel and interactive content and services.

Building capacity or burning out? Supporting indigenous performing artists and filmmakers

Public support for both Indigenous filmmaking and the live performing arts has a number of common features: at a national level the present schemes were introduced in the early 1990s, and both sets of schemes aim to improve the capacity of Indigenous practitioners to tell their stories to national and international audiences. Yet, in the late 2000s, Screen Australia’s support for filmmaking has contributed to well-known successes, whereas Australia Council support for performing arts has been withdrawn from two of the three state-based Indigenous companies. This article reviews the capacity-building strategies offered by the funding agencies to Indigenous filmmaking and performing arts. While the film policies appear to have been more successful than those in the performing arts, both sectors continue to experience obstacles to capacity-building for Indigenous practitioners and organisations.

Singular influence : mapping the ascent of Daisy M. Bates in popular understanding and Indigenous policy

Daisy M. Bates’s influence on Indigenous affairs has often been attributed to her once romantic legend as ‘the saviour of the Aborigines’, obscuring the impact of the powerful news media position that she commanded for decades. The ideas advanced by the news media through its reports both by and about Bates exerted a strong influence on public understanding and official policies that were devastating for Indigenous Australians and have had lasting impacts. This paper draws on Bourdieu’s tradition of field-based research to propose that Bates’s ‘singular influence’ was formed through the accumulation of ‘symbolic capital’ within and across the fields of journalism, government, Indigenous societies, and anthropology, and that it operated to reinforce and legitimate the media’s representations of Indigenous people and issues as well as government policies.

Children's content regulation and the 'obesity epidemic'

Some 30 years ago, Australia introduced the Children's Television Standards (CTS) with the twin goals of providing children with high-quality local programs and offering some protection from the perceived harms of television. The most recent review of the CTS occurred in the context of a decade of increasing international concern at rising levels of overweight and obesity, especially in very young children. Overlapping regulatory jurisdictions and co-regulatory frameworks complicate the process of addressing pressing issues of child health, while rapid changes to the media ecology have both extended the amount of programming for children and increased the economic challenges for producers. Our article begins with an overview of the conceptual shifts in priorities articulated in the CTS over time. Using the 2007-09 Review of the CTS as a case study, it then examines the role of research and stakeholder discourses in the CTS review process and critiques the effectiveness of existing regulatory regimes, both in providing access to dedicated children's content and in addressing the problem of escalating obesity levels in the population.

The coming republic : citizenship and the public sphere in post-colonial Australia

The 'coming republic' (Home, 1992) is a reference point in a public discourse about Australian citizenship and national identity. An analysis of this debate raises questions about the degree to which the mass media, as the site of a contemporary public sphere, facilitates democratic change and promotes or demotes the various interests competing for scarce speaking positions. This paper uses the Australian experience to question the ideologies that support the media as marketplace, and suggests the need for an alternative to liberal-democratic and pluralist approaches to theorising the public sphere.

Creative choices : changes to Australian copyright law and the future of the public domain

Changes to Australian copyright law introduced under the Australia–United States Free Trade Agreement will diminish the public domain, criminalise common copyright infringing practices and locally introduce significant portions of the controversial 1998 American Digital Millennium Copyright Act. This paper examines these imminent changes to Australian copyright law, with specific attention to the potential effects of the extended duration of copyright protection and the introduction of technological anti-circumvention measures. It argues that public domain-enhancing activities are crucial for sustaining cultural creativity and technological innovation, and discusses the potential role of the Creative Commons movement in establishing economically viable and legal alternatives to the current model of trade-oriented copyright reform.