What are the peculiarities of Australian modernity? How can we make sense of Australia? This programmatic article opens up questions of how to think about Australia through thinking about thinking about Australia. National and imperial fallacies abound - that Australia is derivative of origin or environment, and is allegedly obsessed with identity crises. Much analysis of Australia is either celebratory or dismissive. Too often the question is `who are we?' rather than `what has been the nature of our collective and (...) split experience?' The argument presented here is that the idea of Australian civilization can be used to hold these two dimensions together within the framework of an accelerating globalization process which divides rather than unites. Three negative and three positive theses are advanced to this end, anticipating a further article which follows Tocqueville into the antipodes. (shrink)

What is the nature of modernity in Australia, or in the Antipodes? This article presents the view that Australia is an unhappy country because its modernity is caught between at least two different images of pasts and futures possible. There are at least two Australias, one closer to the image of modern tradition or settler capitalism, the other heading in the direction of globalism via its world cities. On contemplation, the image of doubling or pluralization spreads. For there are also (...) at least two distinct little narratives of national foundation, one dystopic, as the halfway modern society begot by penal origins in 1788, the other utopian, as the field of the transtasman social laboratory mooted into the 20th century. These divisions resonate with the theme of the two nations, from Disraeli through to Bauman, but the logical implication of the argument for the discourse about multiple modernities suggests the pluralization rather than dualization of lifeworlds and social forms. (shrink)

Marx and Gramsci remain two of the most constant presences and inspirations for those on the left. Yet there is a persistent sense that we have still to get them right. Perhaps this indicates that sources like this are now fully classics, to be returned, and returned to. In the case of Marx and Gramsci, a series of major works published in the Brill Historical Materialism series breaks new ground as well as returning to older controversies, both resolved and unresolved. (...) Apart from remaining arguments concerning the status of materials unpublished in their own lifetimes, the major tension that emerges here is that between the task of immanent, contextual philology and the challenge of reading ‘Marx for today’ or ‘Gramsci for today’. The tension between text and context, and the question of what travels, conceptually persists. (shrink)

Bernard Smith was a giant on the Australian intellectual scene, and a major analyst of and contributor to the processes of cultural traffic between the antipodes and the centres of the world system. He was a lifelong Marxist, or historical materialist. Yet his scholarship also wore an open weave. Was he then a Marxist in politics? This essay argues that his historicism placed his thinking firmly with the owl of Minerva, rather than in the driver’s seat of history. Marxism, for (...) Bernard Smith, was ex post facto, placing him with the tragic irony of Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire rather than with the activist intent of the Theses on Feuerbach. Distance, for Smith, was everything. (shrink)

Bernard Smith (1916–2011) was a giant on the Australian intellectual scene, and a major analyst of and contributor to the processes of cultural traffic between the antipodes and the centres of the world system. He was a lifelong Marxist, or historical materialist. Yet his scholarship also wore an open weave. Was he then a Marxist in politics? This essay argues that his historicism placed his thinking firmly with the owl of Minerva, rather than in the driver’s seat of history. Marxism, (...) for Bernard Smith, was ex post facto, placing him with the tragic irony of Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire rather than with the activist intent of the Theses on Feuerbach. Distance, for Smith, was everything. (shrink)

These thirteen articles provide theoretical and historically informed analyses of thepowerful currents that are shaping the late twentieth-century political and culturallandscape.

The idea of the 'Australian settlement' has been normalized since its popularization by Paul Kelly into the Keating years. This essay responds further to existing discussion of the idea, including attempts to develop it by expanding its descriptive and analytic criteria. It argues for the pluralization of the idea of settlement, rather than for attempts to develop the 'Australian settlement' by adding further exhaustive detail. The real challenge, beyond the controversy, is the adequate specification of the conditions of Australian modernity. (...) Here the idea and institution of arbitration remains central. (shrink)

Thesis Eleven is honoured to be able to publish this text by our late friend and mentor Agnes Heller. It was secured in the period before her recent death, and is published now posthumously in her memory. Echoing her earlier text written as an Imaginary Preface to Arendt’s Totalitarianism, it responds to themes in the later text, The Life of the Mind. These were among the most eminent of the minds referred to later as Women in Dark Times. Their connection (...) was not only institutional, via the New School, but represented a deep and ongoing affinity and critical engagement in political and philosophical terms. The imaginary letter arcs around issues and questions indicated by Cicero, Kant, Heidegger and Wittgenstein, including matters of republicanism, rhetoric and the question of thinking. Best of all, it shows Agnes Heller at work, at her best: it shows her thinking. Like Arendt, she offers inspiration, provocation, through thinking. (shrink)

This commentary responds to the recent enthusiasm for the idea of interregnum, revived by Gramsci in the 1930s and now by Zygmunt Bauman and Carlo Bordoni. While sympathetic to its impulse, the suggestion is made here that rather than being trapped in between, the West is entering a new authoritarian normal, where innovation as well as repetition are apparent. Trump Fever, in particular, may be a kind of smokescreen or western liberal obsession, not because the problems involved are less than (...) fully serious, but because we allow their anxieties to disable us. Meantime, the serious global contender for global hegemony, The People’s Republic of China, is often occluded from vision. Ergo Spengler: this may be not only the epoch of the decline of the West, but also the rise of the New China. (shrink)

Zygmunt Bauman said of 1968 that he could not empathize with the enthusiasm of the Western Left, that this was some kind of party. In Eastern Europe 1968 stood for an end, not a hope. Soon Bauman would be forced into exile, opening a new and brilliant phase of his intellectual trajectory. Sketches in the Theory of Culture was his last Polish book. It was suppressed in 1968, the contract cancelled in retaliation against his support for reforming politics. Now it (...) has been rediscovered, originally in galley proofs, and translated by Dariusz Brzezinski for Polity Press. Like much of Bauman’s work, it is sprawling and inclusive, taking in anthropology, sociology of culture, ethnology and semiotics. It anticipates his life-long enthusiasm for Lévi-Strauss; and it also foreshadows some of the themes much later to be identified as liquid modern, though it may be the case that the theme of continuity is rather social turbulence from postwar reconstruction to the travails of socialist Poland. In this paper I review some of its themes and its status in the body of his work, and offer some introductory remarks on its importance to the study of culture. (shrink)

Western Australia, like Tasmania, can slip too easily off the map, a periphery on the periphery, its significance occluded by the hegemony of the eastern states of Australia. Yet Western Australia is core to Australia’s economy, not least through mining, and through its proximity to Asia. The West is itself connected more closely to region, in both the local and transnational senses. Its tradition of secessionist thinking indicates a kind of exceptionalist culture. This is a difference which begs for explanation. (...) This essay introduces some motifs and themes of this special issue of Thesis Eleven, entitled ‘Way Out West: Mapping Western Australia’. It locates the West in some recent historical, geographical and narrative context. It gestures toward the biography of its editors, Jon Stratton and Peter Beilharz, and their locations spread across the west and east of the continent. It calls for further scrutiny of these, and other antipodes. (shrink)

Why do caravans matter? Australians, like others, holiday in them, travel in them, cook, eat, drink, play, sleep and have sex in them. They also live in them, often involuntarily. Caravans have a longer history than this, however caravan life has almost no presence in existing historical or cultural sociology scholarship. Our immediate interest is in caravans in Australia, modernity and mobility. Some broader interest is apparent. Theoretical arguments about mobility on a global scale have been developed by Bauman and (...) Urry. Sociologists like Jasper have connected mobility, masculinity and automobility in Restless Nation. The sociologist and writer Marina Lewycka has used caravans as the locus of everyday life study in her novel Two Caravans. In this paper we background some of these broader issues, and offer a case study of postwar caravan manufacturing. This paper anticipates a larger possible research project in these fields. We anticipate this project raising themes like freedom, mobility, escape, utopia; images of domesticity on wheels, décor and design, materials, technology, DIY production and Fordism; caravan parks as homes and as itinerant and long-term accommodation. These themes and images are also necessarily interwoven with class, gender, sex and age. We are interested in the possibilities of using the caravan as a carrier for making sense of postwar Australia. (shrink)

This memorandum offers some incomplete thoughts on the process through which Paul Cardan became Cornelius Castoriadis. This involves some examination of the connection, alignments and dissonances between the Johnson-Forest Tendency in Detroit, and Socialisme ou Barbarie in Paris. Special emphasis is placed on the pioneering work of Stephen Hastings-King and the notion that these intellectual movements centred their energies around the search for the proletariat. Cardan spent more time with Marx; Castoriadis, professionally, spent more time with Freud, and after. The (...) spectre of Freud is as central to these inquiries as is the ghost of Marx. If the spectre of the Worker needs to be dispelled, after Socialisme ou Barbarie, then the dynamics of suffering and creativity also need yet to be maintained in tension. (shrink)

Long before he became one of the leading voices in American sociology and letters, Daniel Bell had a tough early life. He experienced poverty and socialism early, in a life taking on the big themes of the 20th century: communism, capitalism, Marxism, Americanism, modernism. In this he was the beneficiary as well as the critic of modern Americanism, or American modernism. In this essay I focus on a relatively overlooked Bell classic, Marxian Socialism in the United States (1996 [1952]). Here (...) Bell works in an essentially Weberian optic, but one which takes Marx and Marxism very seriously. This is a major contribution to history of ideas and to labour studies, but also to cultural sociology. Some closing remarks connect Bell’s legacy and these frames to the much more influential, if also unread, collection The End of Ideology (1960). (shrink)

The scope of David Roberts’ book on the Total Work of Art is daunting. It stretches from the French Revolution through to the modernist avant-garde and its dissolution in totalitarianism. If Wagner is its chief leader and artistic animator, it also echoes back to Robespierre, Napoleon and Saint-Simon, and through at least to Bolshevism and Futurism, Stalinism and Italian Fascism. The total work of art totalizes the world of the artwork, but it also adds in the politics of the sublime, (...) turns politics into art and negates both as independent spheres of existence at the same time. In this piece I offer some observations on the thinking of a key switchman in this story: Leon Trotsky. (shrink)

The work of Ivan Vladislavić is well established in his native South Africa, and increasingly recognized on the larger world stage of writing, editing and publishing. If his work nevertheless eludes scrutiny in some quarters, this may also have to do with its nature, and not only with its origin. The works differ and vary; there is no formula or project which proceeds neatly by sequence. No single work can be second-guessed from any other. This is a project full of (...) surprises, connecting variously to art, photography, architecture and to urban studies, setting to work images and practices at once realist and surreal, absurdist and layering, and given to time and place and the universal. How then do we read it, and how does he write? For the purposes of this paper, we explain and locate our enthusiasm with reference to two works, The Restless Supermarket and Portrait with Keys. We seek to identify some key tropes about place and place-writing and cities and city-writing with reference to Johannesburg and the way in which Vladislavić plays his subjects and his readers, placing not only fiction under question but placing writing itself closer to the editor’s deletion mark. This may be, we suggest, a kind of writing sideways. (shrink)

Greg Macainsh is a major actor in the Australian popular music scene. He was the pioneer ethnographic filmmaker of the youth gang the Sharpies, and then bass player and songwriter for the most innovative band of the seventies, Skyhooks. Skyhooks combined new composition, driving music, sarcastic and local lyrics, and keen attention to visuals and costume. This article backgrounds Macainsh and his context. The interview that follows looks further into musical history and performative culture in Melbourne and its suburbs in (...) the period. (shrink)

Bauman's work can be understood as a critical theory, but its east European context needs to be established alongside the west European sensibilities of the Frankfurt School. The question of Soviet modernity and the status of the Polish experience of which Bauman was part need to be placed alongside the more famous critique of the Holocaust, which can be more readily aligned with Horkheimer and Adorno's views in Dialectic of Enlightenment. To this end, some of Bauman's essays and arguments on (...) the Soviet and Polish experience are reviewed in order to begin to fill out this other dimension of Bauman's critique of modernity and totalitarianism. Both Bauman's views on eastern Europe, and my survey of them, are offered as hints for those that follow. (shrink)

No two images of socialism or utopia were more influential a century ago than those of Marx and Bellamy. Marx and Engels famously denied the utopian dimension of their own project; Bellamy celebrated it. In this essay I sketch out some clues for revisiting images of utopia in Marx and in Bellamy. My claim is that Marx failed to develop a systematic utopia or image of socialism. We are left with a series of hints towards five different images of utopia (...) across the path of his life and work. Bellamy's image of utopia is more consistent, but contrary to common understanding, it reflects the unresolved tensions of nineteenth century American modernity expressed through the prism of New England small town radicalism. Bellamy's utopia is connected to the later image of the machine in the garden; contrary to William Morris's assertion, he was not an unmixed modern, and this is one quality at least that he shared with Marx, where the impress of romanticism remains profound. (shrink)

This interview – conducted by Peter Beilharz and Trevor Hogan with Clinton Walker over the course of three months between Melbourne and Sydney via email and Skype – explores the questions of Australian popular culture writing with, against, and of the culture industries themselves. Walker is a leading freelance Australian cultural historian and rock music journalist. He is the author of seven books, five about Australian music. He has been a radio DJ and TV presenter. He compiled and (...) produced four double CD album collections of Australian music – Inner City Sound, Buried Country, Long Way to the Top, and Studio 22. He has been a key writer in several multi-media projects, including the Powerhouse Museum Real Wild Child exhibition and CD-Rom and ABC TV’s hit documentary series/CD/DVD Long Way to the Top. In 2006, a new US edition of his first book Inner City Sound was published. His Golden Miles: Sex, Speed and the Australian Muscle Car has been published in a revised edition in 2009. In 2012, his eighth book, The Wizard of Oz, will be published. Walker is currently writing with Beilharz and Hogan a book called The Vinyl Age: The History of Australian Rock Music, 1945–1995. The interviewers invited Walker to reflect critically on his 35-year ‘career’ as pop avatar, independent writer and critic in the post-war to post-modern Australian popular culture industries. Going from journalism to his path-finding books and television documentaries, the article traces this work’s development both in personal terms and as a symptom of the broader cultural evolution, from the suburbs to pop to art and rock and back again; between London and the provincial cultures of Oz; from one-way American consumerism to local DIY egalitarianism, analogue to digital to global dialogue, youth culture to multi-culturalism, and from the putative low brow to the legimitization process itself of popular culture. (shrink)

The work and ideas of Antonio Gramsci continue to attract serious and sustained scholarly attention. This review essay, which might be viewed as an appendage to the earlier, 2016 Thesis Eleven essay ‘From Marx to Gramsci’, develops some of the lines of curiosity indicated there. Does the globalization of Gramsci occur at the expense of the recognition of the particularity of his thought, its specific time and place, and its clearly revolutionary intention? What do these phenomena signify, almost a century (...) after? (shrink)

The United States has some claim to have risen to a position of intellectual dominance in the social sciences in the post-war years. American social scientists are key players in international conferences and their premier publications have some claim to set international trends. Yet the relationship between American thought and global traditions has been peculiarly under-theorized. This unparalleled four-volume collection is divided into eight parts that focus on American post-war critical theory with special reference to social theory, sociology and politics. (...) It provides a comprehensive survey of the outstanding contributions in the field. Peter Beilharz, through a considered selection of articles, argues that American critical theory can be read not only as European, but also as profoundly American and North American. That is, it is hybrid, at the same time global and local in significance and inflection. In this way, the American experience can be read as a case study for doing critical theory today. This comprehensive collection amounts to a definitive guide to the currents and cross currents of American critical theory in the Postwar years. Peter Beilharz is Professor of Sociology at La Trobe University, Director of the Thesis Eleven Centre for Critical Theory and Associate Fellow, Yale University in 2004 -. (shrink)