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July 15, 2007
In this Don Aitkin lecture at the University of Canberra in 2006 John Frow picks up on the concerns expressed around this event. He says:
Part of my concern in this lecture is a puzzle about what politics has become at a time when traditional concerns with open government and the rule of law have been devalued as, it seems, never before, and yet when this devaluation is conveyed in the very language of truth and justice which is denied at the level of actions. I call this politics 'postmodern', in the sense in which Bill Brown uses that word: to describe a post-Enlightenment and anti-pluralist politics, whether it be that of neoliberalism or of the new religious fundamentalisms, characterised by the invocation of a state of permanent exception and by the authoritarian consequences that flow from it.... And I use the metaphor – one I take from the conference to which this talk is a coda – of a place called UnAustralia, not in order to describe a national ethos, nor to accuse others of breaching some putative core of national values, but rather as a way of describing the logic of negation by means of which this shadowy realm of counter-terror, together with its corresponding politics, is conjured into being.
UnAustralia is the negative image of its positive counterpart, brought into being by means of a magical exclusion of whatever does not fit, an expulsion of the extraneous, of whatever comes from and seems to belong to an outside, of the stranger without and within.
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