practically popular.

Eco asks whether Expos can be taken out of 4 CRITICISM AGAINST THE CURRENT
hands of the rich - whether these international mountains can be ta~ e
to proletarian Mohammeds. The question has changed now. T~n
question is: what to do at a proletarianised Expo when there's .'
tically no proletariat left? Tac- TONY FRY AND ANNE-MARIE WILLIS
What's the difference between Expo and GAAEx?
- Nothing: only the organisers don't know it yet.
Finally: not going to Expo, for me, meant going instead one even;
to not-the-theatre. Under the shadow of Expo's laser lighthouse, an~
equally under that of a billowing cement factory, the people of
End put on a play about the Imposition. A group called Street A.'
This article is a response to the condition of criticism in Australia
working out of an old corrugated iron paint factory, put on Un),
day. It focuses on cultural criticism, especially of visual culture. The
Wraps. It told a simple tale: how the Expo Authority, the Lile,j
i; is often made that those who write this kind of criticism occupy
Party-dominated Brisbane Council, local real-estate agents and mor i most theoretically advanced and politically progressive positions
distant developers conspired to rob these people of their homes 44 ,~table. We seek here to identify what underpins these 'leading edge'
haunts along the old south bank of the river and how resistance was put
.al projects. We will argue that they are still trapped in the
up. The music was provided by a tremendously versatile band who
a«ionalist obsessions and agendas of earlier Australian cultural criti-
shifted from reggae to music hall, dressed up as the Salvation Army. ([ ism. The 'advanced' critics' taken-for-granted cultural nationalism can
had my eye on the bass player, her fleet tiny fingers cruising the big
be seen specifically in their continued obsession with landscape. We
Fender neck.) The actors brought on their simple props, served drinks
have chosen to treat a number of texts symptomatically here. Two
at proper prices in the intervals, chatted, flew on trapezes, sang, acted
collections of essays in particular - Island in the Stream and to a lesser
out the history of their place in the city and its downfall. The
extent The Necessity of Australian Art' - represent the cumulative
shuddered under blankets as the Impo fireworks banged away, not in
cultural projects that we are seeking to understand and reposition.
the theatre but actually out there, reminding too many old men too
much of too many wars. Urban black culture, too- and lessons of the Time's running out in the timeless land
morality of revenge. Why NOT to chip the paintwork on any old
parked Mercedes. Immense dignity and determination. People who The figure of landscape has pervaded both high and popular culture in
weren't actors being themselves showing themselves dying. Showing Australia for nearly a century, dominating discussions of national
identity. The myth that identifies the 'essence' of Australia with its
other ways than Impo for celebrating. The S&PM-Ls dragged me along
to Under Wraps as another way of doggedly and positively not going to landscape has no single source or form. The landscape has been seen
alternately and simultaneously as a pastoral utopia, a harsh and
Expo again. And if you'd seen it, you couldn't have gone either.
threatening desert, a scenic or mysterious backdrop to Victorian
My lightweight grey suit hangs in the wardrobe in suburban Ashgrove. melodrama, a panorama to be gazed upon, a limitless space to be
On the lapel, about the size of a five-cent piece, the. silver badge with imaginatively occupied.
Karl Marx on it is exposed once more. The 'John Hardie, Australia' 'Australia' and landscape have become indivisible. Nation becomes
legend is in the waste basket. Eco's vision was that expos could be synonymous with landmass; in popular imaginings it often becomes
educational, that they could be places where we learn to read the quite an effort to realise that it is not the landmass itself but the fact
difficult text of the world we live in at the end of the century; where that it has been brought under one government that makes Australia a
critical theories of reading would become the most valuable intellectual nation. By contrast, in nations whose boundaries have been created or
property we have; where the complex genres of exhibition, pleasure, contested by neighbouring nation states, national identity tends to be
knowledge could be critically worked out. I didn't go to Expo - but tn conceived of more in political terms. The fact that 'we' occupy a whole
a way I did, after all. I went to where there was a possibility of Eco's continent as nation without any external contestation has been partly ,
kind of expo: to the International Reading Association Conference at responsible for the underdevelopment of politicised nationalism and
the Broadbeach casino, to the Australian and South Pacific Association the heavy load borne by cultural nationalism in Australia. 'We' have
for Comparative Literary Studies Conference on Genre at St Lucia, to never been defined by our others; and thus cannot appeal to a counter-
the Great Australian Art Exhibition at the Queensland Art Gallery, (O definition of ourselves.
Under Wraps at The Paint Factory. Eco will have to wait: the queue 1s
still very long.
222 223
 In recent years it has become de rigueur to acknowledge that nation
identity is a series of inventions. Island in the Stream, subtitled 'My
of Place in Australian Culture', can be seen as the most develop J Ny3rs of high culture that have not been formed merely out of
manifestation of this position to date. Yet, tak~n as a whole, the bo\
does not move far beyond acknowledging national identity as myth,
then either 'deconstructing' particular myths or expressing a mo
thoughtful, ambiguous relationship to particular myths. Because,
cern is centred on Australian national identity, the essays d ,'
consider Australia and its myths in terms of the broader rel4«;,,,
between nation and myth. What we offer here is _some thoughts i~
progress, first on nation and culture and later on nation and myth.
present these speculations in the belief that it is urgently necessary for
criticism to go beyond the static contemplation of the insubstantiali,
of particular myths of nation and begin actively to help shape th
future.
From nation to national culture
Benedict Anderson (and, it seems, almost every author who has read
him) has reminded us that, although nation states are modern inven.
tions, their rhetoric always claims the continuity of traditions stretch.
ing back to a distant past; all nations are essentially 'imagined
communities'.' To say that a nation is imagined does not mean that it
is illusory. Imaginaries have real material force, and the nation as
imagined has been the basis for nationalism, perhaps the most forceful
politico-cultural ideology of modern history. Here we must briefly
distinguish between the nation and the state. The state is concrete: it
makes laws, regulates the lives of its citizens, decides who will and will
not live within its boundaries and applies force against designated
enemies within or without. The state presents itself through the
symbolic form of the nation. Nation is the figure that commands
emotional resonance. Nation and state are so intricately bound together
as a mythological entity that the nation is believed to be the 'real thing'
and the state merely its protector and enabler. But actually it is the
other way around: the structures of the state are concrete, while nation
is a figure deployed by the state as rhetoric, as its symbolic form of
appearance. 'National identity', which is a rhetorical form and trope
of nationalism, can be thought of both as the constructed personality of
the nation and as the agency of the subject's identification with that
constructed figure. . visual conventions. One recent exhibition, 'Golden Summers: Heidel-
In the late-modern world, imagery of nation circulates as a commod-
ity. 'Australianness' appears as product genre, fashion theme, corporate
identity and· sign of official endorsement. In this sense nation has
become detached from space, but returns as a sign that codes territory.
As Meaghan Morris astutely observes when talking about tourism,
national identity is no longer tied exclusively to the political and the
rational, and has no single source of emission or core of authenticity.
224
a concept it parallels, and as materiality it collides with, the sign-
],,red, decentred consumer subjectivities of late modernism.
. ~al' forces are claimed as 'ex;xessions' of or speculations upon the
nato ed character otfh "
the nation. Eliates striving
:.... tor
a h
egemony appropri-.
assum works as signs . o f nat10n
:. an 1d as nat10na
: l ac hi1evement. S ome
ate Su Cl1 ·~b
+works may be accorded such a value because they are seen to contribute
o the formation of national identity; others may be appropriated as
e generalised manifestations of 'national culture' ('something all
,fans can be proud of') because they have achieved significance
'thin a particular field of production, even if the work itself is not at
incerned with 'national character'. One example is the Sydney
Biennale (since 1988, the Australian Biennale), a biennial survey of
contemporary art in which the 'best' of recent Australian art is
displayed alongside the avant-garde art of other nations. Such exhibi-
ions establish a competitive framework within which even the most
;esiscant works can be read as incorporated by and validating the
nation. ·
Cultural nationalism is not the preserve of the state. Cultural
producers of widely different political complexions share the aim of
nurturing a distinctively Australian culture that can gain international
recognition. While intellectual elites struggle over who defines nation-
al culture, this taken-for-granted project unites 'progressive' and
'conservative' factions. Both camps also privilege high culture as an
agency in the formation of national culture.
The elites' obsession with landscape can be seen as part of a process of
psychological colonisation. The displacement of the indigenous popu-
lation was not enough; the settlers had to be able to come to feel and
see each other as being at home in a strange new place. Visual and
literary imagings of this place have helped to codify the environment
and transpose it into culture. As far as visual imagery is concerned, the
history of this progression slides into a mythology. The story goes like
this: at first, European-trained artists fitted the Australian landscape
into ready-made conventions, but in the 1880s and 1890s a later
generation of artists threw off these shackles, opened their eyes and
began to see and paint Australia 'as it really is'. This fiction has stayed
in place in spite of the fact that numerous art historians have pointed
out, for example, that local artists remained dependent on imported
berg and Beyond', attempted to give a more distanced, art-historical
view of the diversity of art in Australia during the 1880s and 1890s;
but the record-breaking attendances it achieved on its tour of state
galleries in 1986 owed less to its scholarly perspective than to the
entrenched coupling of this landscape art with the alleged character of
the nation. In a colour feature promoting the exhibition, the Western
Suburbs Courier declared: 'These are some of the paintings that shaped a
225
nation. They depict the searing heat, dust and light - a unifieq
Australian spirit when pride in being Australian and things Australia,
first surfaced.'?
Embroidered within a national myth, then, the throwing off of
European artistic conventions has become a powerful metaphor f6,
a
colonial liberation; struggle for independence in high culture has
come to stand in for the political and economic autonomy that has
never been achieved. That is why there is such a massive investment {4
the 'Australian landscape tradition'- it has been constructed a
something 'we can call our own', both as fact of geography and as
cultural achievement. And, trite as that may sound, it appears to
provide a continuing motor for criticism and intellectual work in this
country.
This context of cultural nationalism and landscape as national
identity explains the project of Ian Burn et al.'s The Necessity of
Australian Art, a historiographical essay that seeks to recover and
revalue the regional landscape tradition in art in the face of what the
authors see as its 'devaluation' by modernist art historians and critics.
This text draws its dynamic from a recurrent theme in Australian
cultural criticism: the opposition between an assertive localism and an
ambivalently conceptualised internationalism. This is an illusory split;
it can only be sustained in a psychological condition of felt geographi-
cal marginality. The local is specific and material; the international is
an abstraction. One cannot travel from the local to the international,
but only from one local to another, whether the local is defined as a
suburb, city, region or state. In The Necessity of Australian Art,
regionalism is never defined, although it is constantly invoked; it is
almost as if 'Australia' is being named as the region. And the sense of
inequality produced by uneven development transforms the signs of
other locals into a homogeneous, threatening presence: things from
elsewhere (products, lifestyles, fashions in art) seem to assume a
monstrous internationality that bears down upon the nascent indig-
enous culture.
The Necessity of Australian Art argues for cultural nationalism; it
asserts the importance of what it calls a home-grown tradition.
Contradictions are acknowledged, but not satisfactorily resolved. His-
torically, the regional landscape tradition was closely linked with
politically reactionary social values, which were at times explicitly
racist. Yet somehow the authors suggest that this can be put to one
side and the tradition recognised and valued for its 'depth and
persistence', its 'popularity' and its accumulation of a body of knowl-
edge about modes of depicting the Australian landscape. What is being
endorsed is a conservative national popular, in Gramsci's sense - a
'historical bloc' created to mediate between popular aspirations and
politically formed national aspirations. 6 le is as if this is the only
tradition of Australian art that can be identified (indeed, it may well
226
d it must be clung to despite its limitations. The book continues
be) ;nan attempt co recode the conservative national popular as in-
w!'',j oppositional by stressing its resistance to foreign cultural
ciP""_'{_e. modernism). The illusion of cultural autonomy and agency
"", as a phantom for a political project. This rear-guardism is
"",jn trying to save high culture in the belief that its practices have
",,at for political transformation. What ultimately renders the
P",, barren is its particular configuration of marginality as an
,',,,jay. A more thoroughgoing analysis of marginality is the key to
1
e~king ·our of this endlessly reiterated, unproductive and finally false
b re : l di:h
[cal/internat1ona ucnotomy.
1land in the Stream distances itself from any such project of national
~rural recovery. In his 'prefatory remarks', Paul Foss claims that 'the
,f regionalism is losing ground today, is transient or without fixed
address'. The two books nevertheless share a preoccupation with
landscape and cultural nationalism.
/e don't need to go beyond the titles of the essays in Island in the
Stream for evidence of this obsession: 'Landscape without landscape',
'Invisible journeys', Disaggregating landscape and nation', 'Panorama:
the live, the dead and the living'.' The crucial factor here is that these
essays are all attempts at deconstructing myths of landscape. They
refuse to seek unity or finality; they do not subscribe to a truth behind
appearances. Australia is a vacuous sign, an empty centre that sucks in
fragments from everywhere. Out of the slow implosion a collaged
culture of pastiche is assembled; this is the new orthodoxy of a
postmodern national identity. In this formulation, fragmentation and
loss of meaning no longer create feelings of inadequacy and anxiety;
they become something worthy of an ambiguously ironic celebration
a perverse celebration of perversity.
This image is trapped within older myths. The 'dystopic poetics' of
Island in the Stream parallel the earlier preoccupation (especially in
literature) with the impotence of the individual in the face of an
intransigent environment. 8 While nationalistic local ism is vigorously
rejected, the desire for a unique Australian culture co occupy a
legitimate place is still there. Deconstruction provides the mechanism
of salvation: uniqueness is erected out of non-identity. This is a post-
nation national identity.
Landscape as a myth of nation has an alarming emptiness about it
because it is based upon the notion chat identity will arise out of
something that is 'fact', is 'out there' and only needs to be discovered.
Nick Mansfield has pointed to the connections between Australian
literature's 'persistent refusal of modernism' and its faith, exemplified
in A. D. Hope's poem 'Australia', that 'Australian culture... will
Spring miraculously out of a dehumanised landscape'." Many have
pointed to the irony of the dominance of landscape imagery in such a
highly urbanised nation. The power of myth, however, prevails; there
227
is a preoccupation with landscape even when the significance of 4
urban is known. the
While intellectuals remain fixated on a depopulated panor .:
landscape, there is a whole urban-based sign economy in pro.."ic
in which the imagery of nation circulates under direction, br,
products, institutions, corporations and tourist destinations wih.{
recognised signs of 'Australia', frequently with landscape imagery i art.
There is no operational urban/rural binary: the landscape as scene :
generated by and for the city as market and cultural space of consu,,
tion. The obsession with landscape is part of a constant turning 4«,
from the universal urban life, which, it is believed, cannot supply
desired sense of identity.
a, e
In official rhetoric, every nation promotes its modern cities wit],
imagery of skyscrapers, freeways, planes overhead, bustling shopping
centres and the like. Even with its scattering of local signs, the cit
declares a desire to be within a universal community. The cities are
employed symbolically to declare that we belong to the modern world.
But in Australia there are very few of them and they are devoid of
mystery, of romantic potential. The drive for the national myth and
the limitations of the cities keep the glazed eye fixed on the landscape.
What passes as a deconstruction of the myth of landscape turns out to
be an unwitting reinvention and reinvigoration of it. Island in the
Stream is dominated by the marking out of Australia as imaginary geo-
space. The 'Australia' that is visualised is still a space in which figures
move through emptiness; it is rarely envisaged as an urban space in
which populations dominate the scene.
Place, space and displacement are clearly important themes in
thinking about a society that has been founded upon the dispossession
of one people and the settlement of other displaced people. But in
Island in the Stream displacement is so frequently hitched to the
fascinated contemplation of the aesthetics of landscape that a good deal
of its critical potential is immobilised. From a number of perspectives
Island in the Stream is a praiseworthy achievement, representing a new
level of sophistication and a serious critique of unitary and anglocentric
myths of national identity. '' The sophistication it represents, however,
is part of the problem. Complexity and sophistication have become
synonymous with progress in Australian cultural work. The most
damning adjective that can be applied to a work is crude the word is
spat with disdain from cultured mouths. Though a few of its essays
deal with popular culture (most notably Adrian Martin's 'No flowers
for the cinephile') it is not Island in the Stream's project to reconstruct
national populars. Despite Juan Davila's play at transgression includ-
ing the bicentennial logo in one of his porn scenarios the book turns
out to be an exemplary bicentennial publication. Its text and space
were marked out in advance by a state agency's desire for high cultural
speculation on Australian identity to complement the disparate popu-
list events and projects that were branded with the bicentennial mark.
228
le in the Landscape
i
pthnod
implication of what we are arguing is that cultural criticism needs
The
, be more alert to 1ts . own effects.
II O )ne area where this need is most
tis in the dominant culture's ongoing commentary on Aboriginal
urge fter decades o sf·rnv1s1
·Bili - an 1d neglect, Aboriginal art has been
1 1ty
A
il idd :.
zed on ' 8""";" den critics as an area to promote and discuss. Such
motion an l1scusston are automatically assumed to be supportive
F{original desires for self-determination. Yet the opposite has
japened. There is now a clear 'class' of producers of visual imagery
he most visible and successful being the inhabitants of isolated Central
,,j Northern Australian communities such as Papunya, Yuendumu,
piingining and another 'class' - a burgeoning field of non-Aboriginal
experts presenting, mediating, writing commentary upon and thus
romoting a new field of commodity production. It has become
P
necessary component otF reputation,• · if of 'progressiveness', to
a signiter
support contemporary Aboriginal art. Colin Symes and Bob Lingard's
'From the Ethnographic to the Aesthetic' in Island in the Stream
rehearses the available 'progressive' positions.
Much of this white commentary tries hard to be sensitive. Critics are
careful to point out that there is no equivalent in Aboriginal culture to
Western notions of art as disinterested aesthetic contemplation; that
Aboriginal visual imagery is rich in sacred and often secret meanings;
that comparisons with Western abstract painting are ethnocentric and
inappropriate; that exchanges between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal
artists are still unequal. These sensitivities, however, are displayed for
the benefit of an assumed non-Aboriginal audience; they drift towards
art appreciation just as easily as they affix themselves to an anti-
exploitative stance. This discourse on commodities is endless. It never
stops and asks how there might be a productive collaboration between
Aboriginal political aspirations and other progressive political forces. It
does not ask whether art is the most appropriate terrain of operation, or
whether it may in fact be necessary to maintain a strategic silence on
particular Aboriginal issues to forestall the production of the neo-
colonised, the echo, the black voice that speaks white words. Critics
voice hollow sentiments about the desirability of equal exchange
between cultures of difference, but give no thought to how this might
be achieved or to whether, for example, it might in fact be hampered
by present reviewing practices. Such criticism perpetuates a situation
in which equal participation becomes a sleight-of-hand induction of
Aboriginal subjects into the dominant culture's value system for
example, through training Aboriginal people in cultural management.
On a more general level, contemporary Aboriginal art is rapidly
being absorbed as a vital new element of national culture. And
landscape is used to mediate the passage to this newly named fount of
all Australian mythology. From being a 'dead heart', the centre has
now become a source of content, 'teeming with life and forms, with
229
 '
tracks and ciphers of the "Dreamtime".' Clearly the Dreamtime i
not about to displace Western rationalism, to become a new myth 4£
origin for the dominant culture. Rather, Aboriginal mythology an4
visual culture are being appropriated as a sign of continuity an]
spirituality. It can supply an appearance of depth and meaning,
especially of landscape. So a generic Aboriginality is emerging to
signify Australianness across a spectrum of commodities. In so far as it
focuses on the object, criticism is implicated in the process of recoding
Aboriginal forms from quaint aberration to mainstream style. It is
highly questionable whether this automatically benefits Aboriginal
people. In recent years, while Aboriginal cultural products have leapt
into prominence, Aboriginal political movements have lost ground and
the socio-economic position of Aboriginal people has remained
stagnant.'
Criticism and myth re-placed
Individually and collectively, we are who we are told we are. The
means of telling can be given many names as culture, history,
tradition, narrative or myth. Any of these amorphous classifications can
subsume the others and each carries with it a bundle of theoretical
problems for the cultural critic, especially concerning the nature of the
categories and the various discourses in which they are used. Criticism,
as gatekeeper of taste, quality, knowledge and truth, actively directs
theory and the application of cultural forms. Theoretical shifts have
historical consequences. In common with culture, history, tradition,
narrative and myth, criticism is a mobile site in the regulation of
knowledges that inform us about what is of value in our past and
present, and therefore in our future. .. . unity.'?
One of our aims in this essay is to assist in the formation of a new
cultural space and a new voice that is committed to criticism directed
towards the future. Ideas are integral to the forces of production. Our
intention is to unite criticism with the development of a politics in
which quality and values are prised away from questions of taste and
attached to an ecology of survival. ...
Our strategic disposition towards culture and criticism needs to be
made clear here. Our position is founded on a rejection of the humanist
notion of culture as redemptive. We do not accept the idea that
humanity will fall back into the shadows without the guiding light of
cultural leadership. The cultivator, as artist or critic, like the scientist,
has so often regarded nature as low, as threat, as transcended origin and
therefore in need of conquest and domination. The cultivated subject 18
seen to be the mind grown above nature and in command of it, totally
separate from the baseness of body..
This discourse has self-evidently failed. Humanity has damaged 1°
own ecosystem, its collective and interdependent body, through the
alienation of self from a nature that is external, other. An ecology of
230
.,al extols neither a rationalist command of nature nor a romantic
survvi to it - nature never went away b ut a major ' reassessment of
return: : di he' ·ff
] and economic actions according to their effects on wellbeing
soc1a 4
·+fin the biological d and soc1al d ecology. Ifh umantty : ts: to survive,
• we
ha there
witht recognise that h :. no ·, outstte
s ·ide'frrom whtcr
h'ch to speark or act; we
mus t gain a new normative : matrix " fefor the
h conception
: anc1d production: of
~us world. Survival is the one universal value that transcends the
,pmnation of difference. It is on this broad argument that we base
P""ce towards criticism as it is and criticism as it could be.
',,fundamental questioning of criticism is implicated in a similar
engagement with culture, history, tradition, narrative and myth. In
fer essay, 'Panorama: the live, the dead and the living', Meaghan
Morris is justifiably critical of those who attempt to discredit and
diminish fictive forms by placing myths in binary oppositions to 'truth'
r 'reality'."" She tilts toward, but does not follow through to, an
exploration of the functions of myths- what they do, how well they
work and for whom. She does not, for example, examine myth as a
narrativised mode of 'making sense'; instead, myth is displaced by a
form of critical conduct and procedure. This approach is shared by
other authors in Island in the Stream. In his prefatory remarks, Paul Foss
poses the essays against the current myths of Australia as place in this
way
Using anomalous associations, metaphoric disengagements and gen-
ealogical collapses, the authors thus intersperse these myths of place
with genuinely new myths to disturb the close fit that exists between
space and place, between time and history, producing instead a kind
of dystopic poetic substitute for an inadequate political or spiritual
Old myths are characterised as untrue accounts to be opposed by new
ones. Rather than telling an alternative story, however, the book turns
over the ground of telling. The received forms are not accepted, but
nothing much lies on the other side of the critique. Like Walter
Benjamin's angel of history, criticism is propelled into the future 'to
which its back is turned', while in front of it 'the pile of debris ...
grows skyward'.I /hile individual essays in Island in the Stream resist
incorporation in the editor's schema, the whole has to be viewed as
greater than the sum of its parts. It is this 'whole' that is of concern
and especially the pervading assumption that myths/mythology are
evident, recognisable (especially to intellectuals) and open to dissection
and reinvention. Myths, like art, might not be able to be defined
precisely, it is implied, but what a myth is and what distinguishes it
. from other cultural forms is self-revelatory we know it when we see or
hear it.
If critics and other cultural producers are to have some control over
the naming, analysis and even the creation of myth, they need a more
231
adequate understanding of myth itself. Like history, tradition, nar
tive and their hybrids, myth is not reducible to a specific form, ge
meaning or property. The quality of a myth is identified by :'
.... f-he Its
explanatory power within the changing circumstances ot the culture j4
which it was created. In these terms, a myth can be equated wit]
Thomas Kuhn's notion of a paradigm: it is the best explanation there:
until a better one comes along. 7 In these terms a great del lea of hist,1s
and many bodies of knowledge based on interpretive methods
mythologically grounded, though Western rationalism has worked
hard to conceal the fact. The tradition of the Enlightenment is pose]
against myth; 'enlightened thinking' has been understood as counter
force to myth. " Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno contested thi
in the Dialectic of Enlightenment with the thesis that 'myth is already
enlightenment; and enlightenment reverts to mythology. hl • 19A central
nexus here is between homeland and myth. For Jurgen Habermas, the
homeland is a non-mythic place where one feels one's identity can be
discovered. In chis sense it is a place of history. In his formulation, the
conscious subject continues co be formed by breaking free of myth,
then negated by the regressive search for origins. Identity and know-
edge of identity dissolve into one another. Habermas qualifies his
argument, however, by reference to Adorno and Horkheimer. In their
reading of Homer's Odyssey, Adorno and Horkheimer noted that the
epic opposed homeland to myth. But they also observed the fascist
inversion of this relation, in which the homeland becomes the mythic
place. " The dualities in play throughout this discussion history vs
myth and reason vs myth- are problematic. Both oppositions do in
fact converge: so, for example, the fascists' contradictory notion of
belonging co a mythic homeland implies a desired 'progress' from
reason and history, lodged in the present, to a rediscovered historical
time that was ruled by belief. While we might accept the conclusion of
the analysis, we reject its binary logic. Much that is claimed to be
scientific history can be exposed as myth. It is impossible to draw a line
between myth and history; they flow into and impersonate each other.
Myths, as Barthes recognised, are not bonded to any medium of
expression or narrative device.'' Neither are they historically stable.
When circumstances alter, the form and function of myth may change.
For example, in commodity cultures there has been a reconfiguration of
the relative positions of myth, the literary text and the figural text (the
image - especially the cinematic image); this, as Scott Lash has argued,
22
is one of the shifts that characterise postmodernism. Compare the
figural myths that Barthes explored in Mythologies in 1957- the new
Citroen, wrestling, toys, steak and chips with the media manufacture
of Ronald Reagan as image in the 1980s. The creation of imaged 'need
through the form and function of myth has undergone a marked sh!
in scale and effect.
In understanding myth it is also important to consider the role of the
grapher. Here, structuralists such as Levi-Strauss have bccn
eth"",j for their assumption that the ethnographer could crack
,,t codes, decipher another cul@re's mythology and place it
:+Hin a totalising system of meaning. Structuralism can be seen to
with» ch act off cultural
flawed because the l, d translation
l,·' : performs
it .4. •
is always an
£ transformation. The anthropologist is not uncovering a culture
tct creating a new mythological narrative. What is cold or written may
nuenced as much by a concern for literary taste, style and form as
[ a preoccupation with scientific detail.
'rinyth, history, tradition and narrative combine to tell us who we
e, what do the 'genuinely new myths' promised by Foss seek to
",,,o what does a 'dystopic poetic substitute for an inadequate
"jical or spiritual unity' add up to? The 'inadequate political or
~;ritual unity' names the current identity of the national popular.
/hile it is certainly inadequate, what Foss et al. offer as substitute is
an alienated, free-roaming, aestheticised sensibility a high-culturalist
stance in a detached, avant-garde formulation that cannot transform
and produce what it would wish to put in place. As myth, it disdains
popular culture. It therefore can offer nothing to the creation of new
national populars (with the emphasis on the plural). It is also inad-
equate as a critical response to the issue of myth and identity of place as
it is created by the cultural pluralism of the nation and nation state.
Identity, Marginality and Yearning
Australia is not a singular island in the stream. Once issues of the
nation's cultural plurality are put into the picture, thinking about the
formation of shifting identities can become genuinely complex. There
is an intricate social interplay between memory, psychological projec-
tions of belonging and the geo-spatial sense of 'being' where you are.
In Australia, we migrants were told we needed an identity at the
very moment that we became migrants or were told we were no longer
colonial subjects." Identity in this sense is unsecured and strategic; it
draws on and negates the past, displaces and replaces. What we are is
deemed inadequate, whatever our cultural background. It might be
that we have an identity, but it is not a 'proper' national identity. With
decolonisation, a need was created for a new spirit of time and place co
supplement the cultural identity arising from place of origin. At the
same time there is a feeling of lack, which powers a pointless striving
for an authentic self, a self that can know itself because it knows where
it belongs, or vice versa. The problem has not been a lack of knowledge
of place, but rather a lack of knowledge of the place's social and
geographical placement in relation to other places.
The lived condition of being here has incorporated a fundamental
repression of yearning. " At the core of this feeling is a knowledge that
what is desired can never be; there is no certainty of achieving selthood
by particularising a known tradition and its collective culture. Unreal-
233
ised yearning frequently delivers only a sense of bitterness, resentment
indignation and inferiority. Others' self-knowledge is read as smug.
ness, and their failure to acknowledge 'our' equality or superiority gives
the identity drive a paranoid dimension. The emergent tradition of
'wishing for tradition' and 'belonging' gives form to an emergent
culture of despair.'' Here, the inner-city postmodernist occupies the
same ontological space of unhappiness as the invisible fringe-dweller
the suburban commuter and the outcast.
We place ourselves on the margins of the landmass we equate with
nation. Hence we live in the margins, in that condition between a place
and a nation, seeking external and internal. recognition of some kind of
identity. The projection of identity becomes a parody, a play, a
deception that is employed individually, socially and internationally.
The avant-gardists' myth of aestheticised nomadic alienation is no
answer here. The alternatives commonly presented are no more attract-
ive- a monocultural hegemony or the cultural relativism of 'multicul-
turalism'. But if the rules, projects and objectives are to change, we
must radically rethink and rework the myth of nation.
Nation to Post-nation
We now turn to the concrete character of the nation state. In his recent
book The Nation State and Violence, Anthony Giddens argues that a
nation state only exists when a state 'has a unified administrative reach
over the territory over which its sovereignty is claimed'. A nation state
'is therefore a bordered power container'." Power here is defined as a
monopoly of the means of surveillance, control and violence and of
their application as agencies of internal pacification and intervention.
In this context, Australia is not a fully operational nation state. Its
capacity for surveillance of its people is limited, and its armed forces,
though sufficient to secure internal pacification, are not sufficient to
defend such a large landmass from any major external threat. National
security therefore depends on the existence of powerful allies. In
Australia, as elsewhere, this situation weakens claims to national
sovereignty. .
Any reworking of the myth of nation implies a contestation with
the power of myth, and of the state as it subjugates the citizen to
the sovereignty of the name, story, idea and spirit of nation. In the
interplay between nation, nation state and nationalism, cultural myth-
ology and political ideology fuse and obstruct the rise of ocher
identities, especially those chat could dislodge national populars from
nationalism. Ideologies of mutual coexistence such as multiculturalism
presume assimilation by a process of accommodating (acceptable)
difference into the materiality of the national formation. Fragments Of
difference become assimilated in the first instance as administratrve
categories; then cultural difference is taken up and projected as
ethnicity in the elaboration of an overarching whole.
There is, however, a double bind. The very process of inducting
4~fferences in order to accommodate and transform them obstructs the
lution of a hegemonic national identity. The most obvious instance
[,}js contradiction is the claim upon Aboriginal identities. The state
appropriates these identities to give a specificity of origin and 'colour
'astralia; meanwhile, Aboriginal people continue to be subjected to
i racism of the state itself and of the institutions whose racism the
' ate implicitly condones. At the same time Aboriginal demands for
1,4d rights express, above all else, an identity and desired future outside
+he nation within which Aboriginal people appear to be territorially
circumscribed.
After 1988 Disaggregation ofa Nation
Are there any post-nation imaginaries that cannot just be dismissed as
whistling in the wind' imaginaries that do not just aspire to reform
failed orthodoxies based on ideas of essence and unity? Stuart Cunning-
ham's article in Island in the Stream is suggestive here. Under the
evocative title 'Disaggregating Landscape and Nation in Chauvel',
Cunningham subjects two films by Charles Chauvel Greenhide (1926)
and Heritage (1935)- to a deconstructive reading, situating them as
cultural forms that generate the nation as an imagined community."
Cunningham thus associates the construction of the nation with the
process of cultural fabrication.
This kind of analysis can be inverted. The imaginary composite
object chat is assembled - the unsecured, hegemonic nation- can just
as well be disaggregated as can the texts and processes that contribute
to its formation. With chis inversion, Cunningham's analysis could
crave! in two directions. He exposes a narrative of time and place that is
open at either end, moving forward and leading back. The synthesis
between the 'here and now' and the 'then and elsewhere' is always
mediated by cultural producers (Chauvel among them). The films chat
Cunningham selects are concerned with assembling the 'building
blocks' of the imaginary nation. Equally, the process could be read in
reverse: given that the imaginary nation has not come into being, the
history of the representation of nation falls back into its imaginary
sources of displaced and dystopic origins. Disaggregation of the kind
Cunningham deals with rests alongside, and can be attached to, a
history of Australia as a nation whose political and economic unity are
only partially established. For instance, the failure of the structure of
Federation to cohere its parts has meant an additional load on one of the
normal' functions of ideology to carry the material actuality of the
imaginary of nation. This ideological overloading is the Australian
condition.
Disaggregation is not just discernible as a reading of the formation
and dynamic of cultural forms. Neither is it a matter of a fragmented
modernity sliding into a chaos of dysfunctional difference, although it
235
could be. The form it will, or could, take is a matter of political cho7
Australia's neo-colonialist economic dependency is now under?'
a sea change. This is occurring within the context of a ~i$,$
restructuring that is remaking the economy and culture of moder4.
itself. " Japan's purchase of space around the Pacific rim is boy"
investment strategy and a strategy of satellite territorial develop,,'
It is thus also an agency of gradual disaggregation. Australia is a targ t.
area for Japan partly because it is politically compliant, it has spacej
its ability to secure its borders economically and militarily is limited
Ironically, Japanisation has generated old and new 'yellow peril' racisn
and jingoistic patriotism that could establish a firm model of national
identity through a fear of the other a model that could only fall int
place during the ending of nation and thus be no more than its epitaph.
It is time to end the old project of seeking to build a national
culture, certainly as a self-deluded possibility but also in its more
recent negative form of a disillusioned national sentimentality and
dystopic fascination with the intercourse of ghosts and the living dead.
It is a fool's errand to search for the story and language to provide the
comfort of knowing that one does or does not belong. However
problematic these ideas we offer may appear to be, they (or something
like them) are needed if we are to begin to crawl towards an affirmative
course of action. Without affirmation, the forces that threaten our
psychic, social, environmental and ecological survival are given free
rein over the field of force and desire. Elegant indifference and the
cultural politics of despair are the dark side of modernist and post-
modernist critical theory. They easily transmute into a modality of
suicide or violence. 'I
The disaggregation of nation and its imaginaries is an affirmative
tendency: what it liberates can be reformed to act as the foci around
which diverse communities of interest can cluster, operate and inter-
communicate. The place as landmass is fixed; the space is not, for it is a
social-cultural form. The process of disaggregation is already in train.
The move being advocated is not a voluntarist willing into being but
rather a strategic, co-ordinated action towards something that is
already present as the logic of several cultural, economic and political
discourses.
Giving no particular significance to the order of presentation, we can
list in summary six historical directions that confirm the disaggrega-
tion tendency:
i) Dysfunctional federalism - the relative autonomy maintained by
the States .has always negated the attempt at centralisation. The
Commonwealth has never been developed as a political and economic
model to enable the functioning of exchange and common interest.
ii) The logic of multiculturalism, as policy and social circumstance,
has been argued as marking the end of nationalism. ? The logic
carries through to the end of the nation as multi-nation.
236
;~) The foreign ownership of land, resources and means of produc-
ion belies the unity, political representation and sovereign powers of
the nation state.
~) The land rights movement undermines the rationality of the
ation per se; it is a politics of national disaggregation. The logic of
,j, Aboriginal claim is unique but its implications are wide-
ranging. Every supporter of land rights is a de facto supporter of
disaggregation.
) 'Difference' and fragmentation have been acknowledged from a
spectrum of viewpoints within the intellectual stratum the plural-
ist, avant-garde, feminist, vanguardist, progressivist nexus. It is
logical to move from analysis to political advocacy so that the
dystopic nationalism of a poetics for nation without 'unity or spirit'
can be named and discarded as a form of sentimental attachment.
vi) The cultural economy of nation, as a sign produced within
commodification and exchange relations, delivers images of nation as
representations without reference. Nation appears, as valorised sign/
product, only to disappear through the act of consumption and then
reappear as a desired new commodity. Such an economy transforms
not only 'external' perceptions but 'internal' ones too. It powers the
shift from nation as a mythological discourse towards nation as a
mythologised figure; there is a discernible movement from belief to
fetishised image. Remember the 'celebration of a nation' in 1988,
and the cynicism with which it was greeted as a vacuous slogan,
event and product?
A considerable amount of time and effort would be required to
elaborate each of these historical directions, consider them together and
theorise all their implications. At the centre of such an undertaking
would have to be a socially based, reflective and forward-looking
criticism, which we suggest can be termed prefigurative criticism.
This is a criticism that produces critiques before the object with which
it is engaged has fully materialised (for example, a building that has
not yet been constructed); it visualises futures in order to change them
(as it does when it assesses the ecologically harmful effects of current
practices before they take full effect); it theorises the possibility of
change in the relationship between the author and the critic, the
creator and the commentator, the literary text and the text of criticism.
A projective drawing out of events, political tendencies, environmental
changes, industrial developments and so on is written as a speculative
prefiguration of the 'yet to be' in order to be critically commented upon
and to effect a political unfolding. Disjunctures between reality and
representation here become objectives rather than theoretical insights.
Such a strategy can generalise, mobilise and build upon the tactics
employed in writing various forms of speculative fiction. It is a
criticism that acts to contest certain strategically selected determinants
of a reality that has not yet arrived.
237
 The function of criticism should not be (and maybe never is) limiteq
to the retrospective judgement of cultural forms; it should not just ]
about the production and policing of norms, especially norms of ta
Criticism, we would argue, needs to become politically intervention;
and strategically pragmatic; it needs to acknowledge and focus on ++
condition of late twentieth-century crisis in specific conjuncture
whether they are named as crises of economic, environmental, intelle
tual, political, social, personal or critical authority.
It follows that a politics of prefigurative criticism requires the notion
of critical distance to be brought into visibility and substantially
rethought. ? Unless this occurs, there is no mechanism for criticism to
select and position itself in relation to a specific conjuncture and its
dynamics. It is essential that active choices be made about where and
when criticism should speak, about what and to whom. The authorita-
tive voice of distanced judgement grows weaker by the day. The
ethical, political and pragmatic demands of adopting new concepts of
critical distance would, however, mean reconstituting:
o The critical distance between the author and the critic, the
object of criticism and communities of interest; this· implies the
critic's adoption of a clearly worked-out position in relation to both
the object of criticism and the audience.
• The critical distance between the critical, unstable condition of
the physical and social world and public invitations to action.
Criticism can incite action, in circumstances over which the critic
has no control; such effects need to be predicted and used to guide
the form and content of criticism.
o The critical distance between the critic's ethical objects and the
actual historical conditions that determine the possibility or impos-
sibility of criticism's having a wider social effect (as an attempt to
gauge and engage the critical reflexivity of a culture and its ability to
change).
• Finally, the critical distance between 'what is' and 'what might
be', which should be reaffirmed as the basis of criticism. Without
such a pragmatic utopianism, with all its problems, only fatalism is
left. Authority suffers no crisis of authority. Unless criticism is
willing to risk speaking of the future, the future will be delivered by
the powers of dominance. Under present conditions, this is not a
pleasant prospect.
In posing the invitation to engage in prefigurative criticism, we are
not motivated by an intrinsic dislike of nation, nor by a sense of
intellectual superiority to the 'progressive' modality of Island in the
Stream. It is simply that we believe that, in the interests of our common
survival, it is necessary to counter the fatalism and powerlessness that
238
drive cultural producers everywhere into despair, quietism, inertia
ow
] cynicism. ·l·:
'e are not proclaiming a right of
h 5f ownership: or
"";ring the direction prefigurative criticism should take. Rather, we
spe'
are putting it :. ,forwar ·d as a proto-practice
: wit!ch theh potential
: to
stitute its own object of criticism, provided that it makes a strategic
con>
hoice of theh moment, means an dl locatton " ot5f critical
·I Interventton.
.:
icism united with critique is one of the few tools with which we
n not just deconstruct the world we live in, but reconstruct it in an
~,4e more human than the one a failed humanism has left us.
NOTES
1 Paul Foss, ed., Island in the Stream (Pluto, Sydney, 1988), and an Burn,
Nigel Lendon, Charles Merewether and Ann Stephen, The Necessity ofAustral-
ian Art: An Essay About Interpretation (Power Publications, University of
sydney, 1988).. . .
? A seminal essay in this regard bas been Paul Foss's 'Theatrum Nondum
Cognitorum', The Foreign Bodies Papers (Local Consumption Publications,
Sydney, 1981); a more popular variant has been Richard White's widely read
Inventing Australia (Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1981).
3 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and
Spread of Nationalism (Verso, London, 1983).
4 Meaghan Morris. 'Panorama: the live, the dead and the living', in Island
in the Stream, pp. 182-3.
» Western Suburbs Courier, 9 April 1986.
6 See Antonio Gramsci, Selections from Prison Notebooks, trans. Quinton
Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (Lawrence & Wishart, London, 1978),
pp. 130-3 and 421n.
7 Paul Foss, 'Landscape without Landscape: Prefatory Remarks', Paul Carter
'Invisible Journeys: Exploration and Photography in Australia 1839-1889',
Meaghan Morris, op cit.
8 Graeme Turner, National Fictions: Literature, Film andthe Construction of
Australian Narrative (Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1986). •
9 Nick Mansfield, 'Authentic Culture', in Brian Edwards, ed., Literature
and National Cultures Deakin University, Centre for Studies in Literary
Education, 1988), p. 105.
IO As Meaghan Morris observes, 'the touristic nation already accepts that
identities are mythic, plural, obsolescent' (p. 182).
' For example the essays by Eric Rolls, 'New Guests: The Chinese in
Australia', Sneja Gunew, 'Home and Away: Nostalgia in Australian migrant
writing' and Peter Myers, 'On "Housing" Aborigines: The Case of Wilcannia,
1974', in Island in the Stream; it is worth noting that none of these articles can
be accused of an obsession with landscape.
? Colin Symes and Bob Lingard, 'From the Ethnographic to the Aesthetic:
An examination of the relationship between Aboriginal and European culture
Australian art 1788-1988', ibid., p. 204.
Space doesn't allow further development of these issues. See Anne-Marie
Willis and Tony Fry, 'Art as Ethnocide: The Case of Australia', Third Text,
239
 no. 5 (Kala Press, London, Winter 1988-9), and 'Ethnocentrism, Art anq ,
Culture of Domination', Praxis M, no. 20 Perth, 1988). he
T'HE ROAD WARRIOR
Meaghan Morris, op. cit.
° Island in the Stream, pp. 1-3.
6 alter Benjamin, 'Theses on the Philosophy of History IX', Illumine;
• 1011s DEIRDRE GILFEDDER
(Fontana, London, 1979), pp. 259- 6 0.
7 Thomas Kuhn, The Structure ofScientific Revolutions (University of CH;
Press, Chicago, 1970). ·@go
' Jurgen Habermas, 'The Entwinement of Myth and Enlightenmer .
Horkheimer and Adorno', in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity 44,'
Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1987), p. 107.
9 Cited by Habermas, ibid.
20
ibid, p. 108. words are a frail emergency bridge flung over an abyss between
21 he visible and the invisible.
Roland Barthes, Mythologies (Granada, St Albans, 1976), p. 110.
22
Scott Lash, 'Discourse or Figure? Postmodernism as "Regime of Signifia. Italo Calvino
tion", Theory, Culture and Society, vol.5, no. 2, Middlesborough, June 1988.
2
3 See Hayden White, The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and
Historical Representation (Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore), p. xx.
2 A good example of this is the exposition of Bronislaw Malinowski 4 D ing 1919 a war memorial was raised at Pimpama in Southern
anthropologist driven by the desire to integrate the role/expressive power of 4esland, in front of the Methodist church on the Pacific Highway.
ethnographer and novelist. See James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture f[as one of the first 'digger' statues, on a standardised pedestal, and
(Harvard University Press, 1988), pp. 92-113. as carved by the masons A. L. Petrie and Son of Toowong.' The
25
Such histories of forced creation, domination and dependency are evident
:ames of the missing from the are.a are carved in marble, accompanied
through a number of accounts; see for example Tony Wilden, The Imaginary
Canadian (Pulp Press, Vancouver, 1980). by an inscription:
26
The notion of yearning fuses a romantic view of fragments of the past with This
a better future; see Dick Hebdige, 'Yearning', in Philip Brophy et al., memorial was erected
Streetwise Flash Art (Power Publications, University of Sydney, 1987),
by the loyal residents of
PP.25-6.
7
Discussed at greater length in Tony Fry, 'A Geography of Power: Design PIMPAMA, and ORMEAU,
History and Marginality', Design Issues, Chicago, forthcoming August 1989. in honor of those BRA VE BOYS
28
Anthony Giddens, The Nation State and Violence (University of California who sacrificed their all
Press, Berkeley, 1987), pp. 116, 120. in the GREAT WAR.
29 1914-1918.
1land in the Stream, pp. 61-82.
30 See Jeffrey Henderson and Manuel Castells, ed., Global Restructuring and
Territorial Development (Sage Publications, London, 1987). They have borne their cross.
3
' See Alan Volfe, 'Suicide and the Japanese Postmodern: A Posnarrative They have gained their crowns.
Paradigm', The South Atlantic Quarterly, 87, 3 (Duke University Press, Though they lie in far off graves
Durham, North Carolina, Summer 1988), and Georges Bataille, 'The And we think of their lives a duty done
Lugubrious Game', Visions ofExcess, Selected Writings (University of Minnesota,
Minneapolis, 1985): 'intellectual despair results in neither weakness .nor Manly unselfish, and brave.
dreams, but in violence' (p. 24).
32
See Stephen Castles et al., Mistaken Identity: Multiculturalism and the Demise Antoine Prost has shown that French First World War memorials
of Nationalism in Australia (Pluto, Sydney, 1988). were not official state projects, but came out of the small communes'
33 The idea of prefigurative criticism is developed in Tony Fry and Pat decision. to commemorate their dead. 2 In Australia, too, the rush to
Simons, ed., Writing on the Wall: Art, Architecture, Criticism, Torture and the raise war memorials, which began as early as 1917, was certainly not
Bond Buildings (Power Publications, Sydney, forthcoming 1989). instituted by a government. In Queensland, monuments were built in
34 The notion of critical distance used is the time/distance between critic and small towns before the official Commonwealth memorial was placed in
object (culturally and spatially) and the measure of critical condition (for Toowong cemetery or the larger Anzac Square built in Brisbane.
example politically and ecologically). See Tony Fry, 'Late Modernism vs Post-
Ken Inglis gives many reasons for this seemingly 'spontaneous' effort
modernism', And (Journal of Art Education), no. 7 (London, 1985).

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