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Communications Commons Seminar Series

A series of seminars in Communications & Media Studies presented on Monday afternoons during semester 2. Recordings of some of the presentations in this series will be available from our podcast by following the links for each seminar below.

Venue Locations

July 20

Associate Professor Peter Murphy

The Spirit of Creation in the Long Run: A Meditation on the Idea of the University in the Age of Conspicuous Triviality

More than thirteen thousand universities exist worldwide, and their numbers are multiplying. Several countries count higher education amongst their most lucrative export industries. Escalating percentages of 18-25 year-olds attend university. Policy makers want to expand those percentages. All this would suggest that the university is in a golden age. But it is not. No one who works in a university anywhere would contend that today is a good time for higher learning. Managerially it ploughs ahead. But for all of its spectacular outward growth, and bureaucratic brio, the university is inwardly uncertain, intellectually dilapidated, culturally brittle, and spiritually numb. The point of the paper is not to state the depressingly obvious, but rather to indicate that the condition of the university is an expression of a much larger and systemic cultural problem which is the general running down of creative energy that has been going on in all advanced societies since the middle of the nineteenth century. At the end of the twentieth century, after 150 years of this entropy, many of the most powerful states in the world declared themselves to be ‘creative economies’ and ‘knowledge societies’. Universities jumped on this self-congratulatory bandwagon. But as compelling empirical data and wry philosophical observation confirms, societies today are massively less creative in real terms than their forbears of the high modern era from the 1870s to the 1920s. This is true of both the arts and the sciences.

The rate of discovery and the rate of innovation have both generally trended downward in the last 150 years with only occasional upward spikes. Ever-more sophisticated means of mechanical and digital distribution, re-mediation, and recycling of ideas masks the fact that creative copyright and patent industries and institutions, not least of all the universities, produce fewer and fewer serious works per capita at greater and greater cost per unit. On one side of a complex equation, we have seen prodigious wealth generated by a distributive leviathan that includes everything from the sale of movie seats to undergraduate university places to television broadcasting to the Internet. On the other side of the equation, the core driver of creation continues to lose energy and decelerate. Eventually there will come a tipping point when the creative decline will begin to dissipate the masking agent, the distribution side of things. In the case of the university it is now eating the entrails of its own living corpse. It is not alone in this. Hollywood today is a vacuous parody of its glorious golden age, as is contemporary pop music compared with its glory days of the late sixties and early seventies. For brief periods both bucked the longer underlying trend of creative unwinding. The great prophet of this unwinding was Friedrich Nietzsche.

In 1872, Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy predicted exactly what was coming: creative decadence. This was an amazing observation given it was made at a time when creativity was actually accelerating upwards. It was a prophecy based on acute sensitivity to and understanding of the enigmatic and difficult nature of imaginative breakthrough. This insight was matched in the twentieth century by the equally astute observer Cornelius Castoriadis. Castoriadis repeatedly and correctly pointed to the precipitous collapse in the level of production of serious creative works after the 1920s. Ever since that visible and measurable creative slump occurred at the end of the twenties, there has been a periodically-revived debate as to the purpose of the university. This debate has been animated by the bad conscience of the university—the nagging feeling that ‘something is wrong’. There have been a number of diagnoses of this unease. Diagnostic milestones (of sorts) have included Robert Hutchins’s The Higher Learning in America (1936), F.R. Leavis’s Education and the University (1943), Raymond William’s Culture and Society (1958), C.P. Snow’s The Two Cultures (1959), Clark Kerr’s The Uses of the University (1963), Jean-Francois Lyotard’s The Post Modern Condition (1979), Pierre Bourdieu’s Distinction (1979) and Homo Academicus (1984), Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind (1987), and Jacques Derrida’s The Right to Philosophy (1990).

If these works were meant to answer the question of what is the purpose of the university in the age of conspicuous triviality, they singularly failed to do so. In part this was because none of them rose to the challenge of Nietzsche’s intuition to look deeply and unsparingly at the sources of creation. What Nietzsche—and later Castoriadis—understood was that if the act of creation is stalled, then there is a pernicious long-term effect of this, no matter how it is masked. Today, the research university makes fewer and fewer great discoveries per capita or per dollar. The scholarly university performs less and less credible innovations. The teaching university transmits smaller and smaller numbers of new works of lasting merit. All models of the university end up turning themselves into tendentious variants of the moral university—as Saul Bellow in Mr. Sammler’s Planet (1970) and The Dean’s December (1982), and David Lodge in Small World (1984), painfully observed. The university is not the only culprit in this unedifying process. The problem is pervasive in the general culture. The culture is dying, and has been for a long time. What is to be done?

Peter Murphy is Associate Professor of Communications and Co-Director of the Performance and Social Aesthetics (PASA) Research Unit, Monash University. He is co-author with Simon Marginson and Michael Peters of Creativity and the Global Knowledge Economy (Peter Lang, 2009). Two further volumes in this series are in preparation: Global Creation and Imagination. Murphy’s other recent books include Dialectic of Romanticism: A Critique of Modernism with David Roberts (Continuum, 2004) and Civic Justice: From Greek Antiquity to the Modern World (Prometheus/Humanity Books, 2001). From 1998 to 2001, he worked in senior editorial roles for Australia’s most successful Internet start-up company Looksmart.

ECPS Library
Room 710, Building 11 (Menzies building)
Clayton Campus
2.00 – 3.30pm

August 17

Kevin Foster

What are we doing in Afghanistan? Military-media relations, national mythography and the reporting of Australia's war

This paper will examine the origins, practices and effects of Australian military-media relations in Afghanistan. It will compare and contrast the Australian Defence Force's (ADF) news management strategy with those of its coalition allies, the US, British, Dutch and Canadian forces. It will consider the Australian media's marginal role in the provision of news from Afghanistan, explain why and how they have been sidelined and analyse its consequences by looking at specific examples of ADF news management practice. It will explore how Australian media coverage of the war in Afghanistan has been shaped by Anzac mythology, how ADF coverage of the the war has been directed more to the reinforcement of national myth than than the provision of a sober accounting of events in Afghanistan, and how as a consequence this has distorted the public's understanding of just what it is we are doing in Afghanistan.

Kevin Foster is Head of Communications and Media Studies in the School of ECPS. He has published widely on the conflict and the projection of national identity. He is the author of Fighting Fictions: War, Narrative and National Identity (London: Pluto, 1999), Lost Worlds: Latin America and the Imagining of Empire (In press) (London: Pluto, 2009), and the editor of What are we doing in Afghanistan? The Military and the Media at War (Melbourne: ASP, 2009). He is currently trying to persuade the Department of Defence to join him in a comparative analysis of military-media relations among the ADF's main coalition allies in Iraq. They aren't keen.

September 14

Associate Professor Robin Gerster

Little Boys and Fat Men: Humanising 'the Bomb' in Atomic Museums in the US and Japan

The dropping of the atomic bombs 'Little Boy' and 'Fat Man' over Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 occasioned a crisis in representation. How to describe the indescribable? How should these events be appropriately interpreted and remembered? And how should they be publicly exhibited? Museum curators are confronted with a problem materially but not essentially different from that faced by writers who retell or imagine nuclear war. Museums are idenifiably political spaces - especially national war museums, which definitively memorialise and enshrine military history. Triumphalism and victimhood are staple subtexts. Given the continuing sensitivities in both the US and Japan over the use of 'the bomb' to end the Pacific War, atomic museums provide especially revealing material narratives. This paper examines major museums in Japan and the US as case studies in nuclear nationalism, and discusses the shortcomings of the museumization of technological destruction.

Robin Gerster is the author and editor of several books on aspects of Australian literary and social history, including the cultural intersections of war and travel, and national relationships with the Asia-Pacific. His latest monograph is /Travels in Atomic Sunshine: Australia and the Occupation of Japan/ (2008). He is presently working on a cultural history of Australian nuclearism. Forthcoming publications include chapters on representations of Asia, in /The/ /Cambridge History of Australian Literature/ (CUP, 2009), and on the phenomenon of 'nuclear amnesia', in /Philosophy after Hiroshima/ (Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2009).

Building 901, Room 235
Berwick Campus
2.00 – 3.30pm

October 12

Professor Massimo Leone, University of Turin
(Endeavour Research Visiting Scholar at the School of English, Communications and Performance Studies - Monash University)

Religions, (in)visibility, and communication: toward a multi-aesthetical society

Cultures differ as regards the way in which they determine and promote a certain equilibrium between visibility and invisibility, representation and irrepresentability. Such difference is evident if one compares religious cultures, for example the Abrahamic ones, the Jewish conception of representability versus the Christian one, but is present also if one contrasts different denominations within a single religious culture, for example the Roman Catholic idea of visibility with the Protestant one, or even different historical stages in the evolution of a religious denomination, for example Medieval and Counter-Reformation Catholicism.

Religious conceptions of visibility and invisibility have been often embodied in (1) verbal texts, especially those that religious cultures consider as “sacred”, in (2) interpretations of these texts, mainly by those to whom religious cultures attribute such exegetic authority, in (3) normative orders undergirded by these interpretations, particularly systems of religious law and customs, but also in (4) visual artifacts, of both religious art and material culture.

One of the main hypotheses proposed by the research seminar will be that so far visual studies, from art history to iconology, from aesthetics to the phenomenology of the arts, from the philosophy of images to visual semiotics, have mostly been characterized by a general bias: since the background from which these disciplines stem, a complex blending of different cultures in which the Greek-Latin and the Christian inputs prevail, emphasizes the role of visual representations, these disciplines have implicitly supported the idea that the best way to know the visual culture of a religious community is to observe, describe, analyze, and interpret the visual artifacts of this community, the way in which this community gives an iconic presence to what is absent. On the contrary, the research seminar will claim that religious visual cultures can and must be studied also from the point of view of what they hide, of what they conceal, of what they choose not to represent, so giving an iconic absence to what is present.

In particular, the research seminar will deal with the following questions: is an aesthetics of invisibility compatible with the aesthetics of contemporary (“Western”) media, that seem to privilege an aesthetics of visibility and even voyeurism? How are religious aesthetics changing in their interaction with contemporary media, and vice versa? How are legal systems currently regulating the interaction between religious aesthetics of (in)visibility and media? More generally: is a multi-aesthetical society possible?

Massimo Leone is Research Professor of Semiotics and Cultural Semiotics at the Department of Philosophy, University of Torino, Italy. He graduated in Communication Studies from the University of Siena, and holds a DEA in History and Semiotics of Texts and Documents from Paris VII, an MPhil in Word and Image Studies from Trinity College Dublin, a PhD in Religious Studies from the Sorbonne, a PhD in Art History from the University of Fribourg (CH). He was visiting scholar at the CNRS in Paris, at the CSIC in Madrid and Fulbright Visiting Professor at the Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley (USA). In 2009-2010, he will be Endeavour Research Visiting Scholar at the School of English, Performance, and Communication Studies at Monash University, Melbourne (AU). His work focuses on the role of religion in contemporary cultures. Massimo Leone has authored two books; Religious Conversion and Identity (Routledge 2004) and Saints and Signs (Walter de Gruyter 2009) and more than 100 papers in semiotics and religious studies. He has lectured in Africa, Asia, Europe and USA.

Conference Room 2, Monash Staff Club
Clayton Campus
2 – 3.30pm