Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / In Australian Aboriginal affairs, the acculturative strand of assimilation developed in large part from Elkin’s religious and Idealist commitment, for which in the years 1928 to 1933 he won social-scientific authority. In competition with both an eliminationist politics of race and a segregationist politics of territory, Elkin drew upon religious experience, apologetics, sociology, and networks to establish a ‘positive policy’ as an enduring ideal in Aboriginal affairs. His leadership of the 1930s reform movement began within the Anglican Church, became national through civic-religious organs of publicity, and gained scientific authority as Elkin made religious themes a central concern in Australian anthropology. But from the 1960s until recently, most scholars have lost sight of the centrality of Idealism and religion in our protagonist’s seminal project of acculturative assimilation. This thesis aims to show how Elkin dealt with problems fundamental to twentieth century Aboriginal affairs and indeed to Australian modernity more generally – problems of faith and science, morality and expediency – in developing his positive policy towards Aborigines.

This is a thesis presented on the position of the distance education student at a distance education university in the present era. Traditionally, the distance education student has been a sort of Cinderella: marginalised, being constructed as some form of lesser version of the on campus one. A largely invisible part of the higher education system in Australia since 1911, the distance education student has really only come to be foregrounded in university education discourses from 1983 onwards. It was not until then that the distance education student emerged from ‘hidden pools’ identified by Karmel (1975), and since then the construction of this student has undergone a number of modifications, mapped in this thesis. At the same time university education itself has undergone a series of modifications, not least of which has been its taking on mercantilist overtones as investments made by students in their own careers and professional development. The modifications, also mapped in this thesis, have progressed to the stage where the construction of the old distance education student is now one of a flexible learner in a mercantilist system of university education. The notion of distance education and the distance education student has undergone significant shifts, redefinitions and constructions, which are tracked in this thesis. My research has focussed on a number of pertinent questions, based on a study of Deakin University and its practice since its establishment. The thesis draws on a number of works which have been informed by those of Foucault, and I have framed my research questions accordingly. I have asked why and how Deakin University came into being as a distance education provider at tertiary level. What were the conditions of its establishment and progression in relation to the political events, economic practices and communication technology in use over time? To consider such questions, I needed to analyse the changes that I had seen occurring in the context of wider restructurings in university education. These had occurred in the context of government forging a closer interconnectedness between education and national economic aims and objectives at the same time as it demanded greater productivity in the face of commercial and industrial sector pushes for applied knowledge. Poststructuralist philosophical developments offer tools to explore not only questions of power, but the practical outcomes of questions of power, and how the complicity of individuals is established. This thesis explores ways in which such considerations helped to shape the changing constructions of the distance education student from a marginalised, disadvantaged and under-represented participant in higher education to a privileged, well catered for and advantaged learner. These same considerations are used to explore ways in which they have helped to shape university distance education courses from a perceived second-rate form of higher education to a prototype that better captures the essential elements of learning for what has been styled in a postmodern world as the Information Age. Overlaid on these considerations is a changing view of the economics of such provision of higher education. It is anticipated that this thesis will contribute to developing new understandings of the construction of subjectivities in relation to the distance education university student specifically, and to the university student generally, in the postmodern world. The implications of this examination are not inconsiderable for students and academics in a self-styled Information Society.

The proof set forward in this thesis is that the method of Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980), which he came in the 1970’s to describe as ‘structuralist’, ‘phenomenological’ and even ‘metaphysical’, owes a heretofore unacknowledged debt to Sigmund Freud (1856-1939). Critics have thus far neglected the influence of nineteenth and twentieth century psychology in McLuhan’s work, although a wealth of biographical material supports the argument that McLuhan’s ‘metaphysical’ method is derived as much from psychoanalysis and analytical psychology (C.G. Jung) as from any of McLuhan’s acknowledged predecessors. Returning to the texts from which McLuhan gained his knowledge of psychology, I trace the influence of Freud, Jung and their disciples upon McLuhan, establishing McLuhan’s use of Freudian concepts and terminology in his first book The Mechanical Bride (1951), and his use of the psychoanalytic concepts of the ‘unconscious’, ‘trauma’ and ‘repression’ in the books that came after it. What McLuhan calls the ‘unconscious’ is more often named by him as Logos, ‘acoustic space’ or the ‘media environment’, and I trace the debts that these concepts owe not only to Freud and Jung but to Aristotle, St. Thomas Aquinas, gestalt theory, art theory, Henri Bergson, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Wyndham Lewis, Siegfried Giedion, Harold Innis, the French symbolist poets of the late nineteenth century and the British modernists of the early twentieth. Despite his rejection of the Freudian argument, McLuhan, like Freud, conceptualizes pain or trauma as the ‘cause’ of transformations (i.e. processes) in the unconscious; but while for McLuhan, invoking St. Thomas Aquinas and Aristotle, technologies are ‘formal causes’ simultaneous with (or ‘preceded’ by) their effects, for Freud and his modern interpreter Jacques Lacan, trauma is ‘paradoxical’ in structure, presenting as both its own ‘cause’ and ‘effect’. Situating McLuhan in relation to French structuralism, I contrast McLuhan’s concepts of ‘figure’ (as cause) and ‘ground’ (as effects), elaborated in his last book Laws of Media (1988), to the concepts of the ‘signifier’ and the ‘signified’ in Ferdinand de Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics (1916), and critique McLuhan’s ‘tetrad’, the ideograph with which he illustrates media ‘effects’, in relation to the psychoanalytic concept of the signifier elaborated by Lacan. In reply to McLuhan’s maxim that ‘the medium is the message’, I conclude that technologies, insofar as they function as ‘formal causes’, are doubly ‘hidden’: firstly, because, as McLuhan says, they can only be grasped through their effects; and secondly because, as Lacan says, their effects can only be articulated when they manifest as ‘disturbances’ in the symbolic order, i.e., as fantasies of the Other’s jouissance (enjoyment). There are numerous stories about how McLuhan would frustrate his critics by refusing to take a ‘point-of-view’, and in fact his (psychoanalytic) technique of ‘putting on’ the audience as a mask, and his (deconstructivist) manner of changing perspectives as often as necessary, sit oddly with his championing of Logos. A comparison with Freud and Lacan finds McLuhan at a ‘paradoxical’ moment in the history of Western thought, poised between modernism and postmodernism, between structuralism and deconstructivism, and between metaphysics and psychoanalysis. / Thesis (Ph.D.) - University of Adelaide, School of History and Politics, 2008

In this paper Mona Hatoums installation Corps étranger is discussed via a post structuralized method based on associative and semiotic comparisons with vanitas, a post-modern self-portrait, and as a representative for modern visual art. The analyze touches upon pornography, science fiction and the quest for scientific conquest in outer and inner space. Theoretical references are Foucault, Freud, Lacan, Barthes, Dolar, Said and Virilio. Hatoum makes the observer a voyageur with the aid of the latest medical technology, endoscope, which gives her the opportunity to make an introvert self-portrait when she films her own throat and rectum. But at the same time she makes the portrait of us all. I interpret this as a fictious science with postcolonial ideas, and the reference to science fiction is close at range. Hatoum takes the role as the other, the woman or the stranger and might flirt with Jülich interpretation of Corps étranger as a sign of the visual cultures colonisation of the human body’s inside, that is a conscious reference to sexuality, ethics and the search for knowledge and power.

This study will embrace certain features of postmodern experience so as to underline subjective embodiment as the condition, corollary, and appropriate focus of textual, rhetorical, and sociopolitical criticism. It will theorize somantics as a conceptual toolkit for mapping the structural correspondence of embodiment to the symbolic order, each thus emerging as the other’s non-foundational “efficient reason.” This study will argue that the flesh mediates the theoretic divisions of structuralism, deconstruction, psychoanalysis, and existentialism, although not in a priori or essentialist ways. It will draw from their vocabularies, combining them into a vocabulary of its own while retexturing their relation to one another. It thus aspires to reduce all rhetorics and metaphysics to the somantic, so as to sabotage conservative fundamentalisms and to establish the terms for an argument with enthusiasts of transhumanism. Moreover, this study will suggest that theoretic systems, cultural messages, and sociopolitical speech-acts inattentive to the condition of embodiment—whether that of their agents, interlocutors, or material mediums of expression— must then seem at once suspicious, maladaptive to the sense contingencies of the moment, and deserving of somantic reduction. In correcting these faults, it will also resist systematizing or universalizing sense-experience; it will function rather as a corpus of maps that rechart the volatile, moment-to-moment interimplication of the somatic and the symbolic. Thus this study takes axiomatically Frederic Jameson’s claim that intertextuality replaces history in the era of transnational capital, seeing in this argument the strategic advantage of taking a theoretic standpoint against diachronic modalities of time. Arguing for the reconstruction of certain narratives as distortions, if not outright falsifications, of the simultaneation of needs, impressions, and changes in a subject’s sense-experience, this study will redirect attention to the relation of certain discourses to the bodies of their interlocutors.

The intention of this work is to explore how Aboriginal learners are produced in the Saskatchewan Adult Basic Education (ABE) curriculum. In addition, this study examines the production of instructor identities in the curriculum. This thesis explores the social and historical contexts influencing the production of the ABE curriculum. Current prevailing discourses about Aboriginal people influence the curriculum documents. These discourses construct a grand narrative about Aboriginal people, producing Aboriginal people in particular ways that become acceptable and legitimate ways of thinking about and behaving toward Aboriginal people. This work examines how such a grand narrative functions to uphold dominance and structural inequalities rather than challenge them. The effect of reinforcing the current, particular grand narrative about Aboriginal people is that, rather than challenge dominant ideologies, the new curriculum re-inscribes them. This work employs the methodology of discourse analysis as a means of examining the production of particular identities for Aboriginal learners in ABE and uses deconstruction to explore the ways that the documents betray themselves in relation to their objectives. This thesis provides analysis of the ways that the curriculum documents produce and reproduce Aboriginal people as deficient and requiring change. This work provides analysis of the conflict within the documents between a desire to challenge dominance and the re-inscription of dominance through discursive practices. In addition, this work demonstrates how the ABE curriculum aids in the production of dominant instructor identities, and how such dominant identities assist instructors to define themselves as innocent and helpful. This analysis of the ABE curriculum reveals that while the curriculum aspires to be a proponent of social justice for Aboriginal learners it has many weaknesses in this regard. This work concludes with recommendations for changes to the curriculum and instructor practices, and for further critical analysis.

Definitions of sexual orientation are reflections of theoretical positions within the essentialist versus social constructionist debate. A cognitive sociological approach to analyzing the positions within this debate allows theorists and researchers to be aware of three distinct theoretical positions or thought communities: natural kinds thought community, social kinds thought community, and empty kinds thought community. Standard content analysis and grounded theory methods are used to analyze the principles, strategies, and practices each thought community uses to mark group membership into various sexual categories. The analysis reveals that each theoretical perspective is marking group membership differently.

The intention of this work is to explore how Aboriginal learners are produced in the Saskatchewan Adult Basic Education (ABE) curriculum. In addition, this study examines the production of instructor identities in the curriculum. This thesis explores the social and historical contexts influencing the production of the ABE curriculum. Current prevailing discourses about Aboriginal people influence the curriculum documents. These discourses construct a grand narrative about Aboriginal people, producing Aboriginal people in particular ways that become acceptable and legitimate ways of thinking about and behaving toward Aboriginal people. This work examines how such a grand narrative functions to uphold dominance and structural inequalities rather than challenge them. The effect of reinforcing the current, particular grand narrative about Aboriginal people is that, rather than challenge dominant ideologies, the new curriculum re-inscribes them. This work employs the methodology of discourse analysis as a means of examining the production of particular identities for Aboriginal learners in ABE and uses deconstruction to explore the ways that the documents betray themselves in relation to their objectives. This thesis provides analysis of the ways that the curriculum documents produce and reproduce Aboriginal people as deficient and requiring change. This work provides analysis of the conflict within the documents between a desire to challenge dominance and the re-inscription of dominance through discursive practices. In addition, this work demonstrates how the ABE curriculum aids in the production of dominant instructor identities, and how such dominant identities assist instructors to define themselves as innocent and helpful. This analysis of the ABE curriculum reveals that while the curriculum aspires to be a proponent of social justice for Aboriginal learners it has many weaknesses in this regard. This work concludes with recommendations for changes to the curriculum and instructor practices, and for further critical analysis.

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