The Hindi film lyricist Gulzar chooses this lyric to open his essay on the place of the song in the history of Indian cinema. The lyrics implore the listener to listen to the song for its emotional power and for its near-narcotic affects. Writing in 1985, Chandavarkar had noted how a proper appraisal of the Indian film song requires the skills of an interdisciplinary scholar comfortable with ethnographic, musical, linguistic, sociological as well as aesthetic analysis. Such is its pervasive presence in Indian culture that “nothing since the Bhakti movement of the 10th to 15th Century A.D. has had such impact on the life of the common man” (245). While this statement may be an exaggeration, the citation draws attention to the importance of songs in Hindi cinema during a period when scholarship on the subject was limited. Chandavarkar then traces how the classical styles or schools [gharānā] made their way into Hindi cinema. The deployment of songs to propel a narrative has a long and varied tradition in India. Many of the country's popular narrative-oriented art forms have used these techniques for a long time: “the traditions of Kutiyattam and Kathakali from Kerala […] Lila from Orissa and of course, the various enactments of Rāmāyaṇa and Mahābhārata” (Mir 2007: 206). Parsi theatre, of course, took up songs with enthusiasm and it is not at all surprising that Indian cinema so readily incorporated songs in their theatrical narratives (206).

Introduction

The refections pursued in this chapter have been occasioned by Stephen Mulhall's probing and provocative comments in a recently published essay titled “The Event of Television: Sitcoms, Superheroes, and WandaVision.” There, Mulhall pursues a sophisticated and compelling elaboration of Cavell's understanding of the relationship between flm and television, suggesting that especially “the full signifcance and implications” of Cavell's 1982 essay, “The Fact of Television” have “been missed” because this essay has not yet “been properly attended to.” He notes also that this is true even of “those well versed in other aspects of Cavell's body of work.” His primary example of this latter claim is me and my work on new television.

Mulhall writes that despite producing a book on new television and despite “drawing on Cavell's account of the medium and media of flm,” I ignore entirely Cavell's “parallel or complementary account of the medium and media of television.” This, combined with Cavell's theoretical prominence in New Television, Mulhall claims, invites for readers of my work “a regret” of quite a “piercing sort.” As Mulhall notes, I do cite Cavell's essay once in the book, but largely to dismiss it as nonapplicable to my analysis, going so far as to say that in the essay Cavell fnds “the [televisual] medium wanting.” Mulhall then raises two points in response to this claim in particular and to my work more generally. First, he points out that, with regard to the idea that Cavell fnds the medium wanting, “neither the belief nor the remark seems justifed.” Second, he claims that my apparent “belief that new television somehow outstrips or falsifes Cavell's account [in the television essay] is not only unargued; it also seems highly questionable.”

This volume of essays serves double purpose. It looks back with the knowledge of today at Stanley Cavell's now seminal book in flm-philosophy, The World Viewed (frst published in 1971 and enlarged in 1979), and at its mostly unwelcoming reviews at the time of its reception just over half a century ago. At the same time, it draws on that work's concepts, categories, and ideas to assess our contemporary world—of flm and in general. Moreover, with the title of Cavell's 2005 essay “Philosophy the Day After Tomorrow” in mind, one will fnd a third temporal dimension running through Cavell's Ontolog y of Film, as its chapters collectively project these past/present reviews onto the future. It does so by looking at The World Viewed's own future, meaning subsequent developments of the ideas from that book in Cavell's later oeuvre, most notably his other books on flm (Pursuits of Happiness from 1981 and Contesting Tears from 1996) and his 1982 essay on Tv entitled “The Fact of Television.” It also, more broadly, looks at their continued pertinence for the future of readers today and tomorrow. Beyond celebrating the past through a collection of reviews and refections on The World Viewed—itself a book of “ontological refections” that conceive the world on screen as “a world past” (as I elaborate below)—the present volume is thus best understood as a series of Cavellian meditations on media and mediated relations to the world, sustained, in the wake of Cavell's own passing (2018), by an ongoing current of thought on the idea of temporality itself. In what follows, I will introduce the collection of essays within the parameters of these temporal dimensions.

Part of a 2021 protest against the then proposed Aboriginal heritage legislation. Photograph credit: Giovanni Torre/National Indigenous Times

A year on from Australia's referendum for Voice, we continue to witness the impact of the No vote, from increasing racist conduct in public by individuals to states and territories intent on punitive criminal laws aimed at disadvantaged Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children and in clear violation of international obligations and UN expectations on the rights of Indigenous peoples. We have no Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander representative body to respond to racism and human rights violations, and to promote Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people's rights under international law. This stands in contrast, for example, to the Indigenous peoples of the Nordic countries and the Sami parliaments, which work at the national and international level to promote their constitutionally recognised rights and hold governments to account for human rights violations. This comparative experience reveals the necessity of constitutional protection and Voice to bring global attention on the Australian governments, address racism and increase respect for human rights and Indigenous rights in our country.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people have a long and proud history of using UN Indigenous and human rights forums to advance their rights, bring human rights violations before the international community, and advocate for reforms. We were active in the development of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) and have consistently participated in UN treaty body mechanisms to highlight human rights issues.

This chapter ofers a reexamination of the role of modernism in Stanley Cavell's work, focusing primarily on his refections in The World Viewed and tracing how the modernist problematic is both inherited and transformed across his intellectual development. The discussion unfolds in four sections. The frst section explores how The World Viewed constructs cinema as a medium that, while apparently avoiding the fate of modernism, in fact enacts the modernist experience of displacement, isolation, and the need for acknowledgment. This reading complicates Cavell's own contrast between flm and the modernist predicament of the other arts, showing how flm, too, participates in the modernist problematic, both through its automatisms and its mythological view of the world. The second section broadens the perspective by placing Cavell's refections on cinema within the larger trajectory of his philosophical work. Here, the discussion turns to his engagement with flm as exemplary of American popular culture and to his discovery of Emerson and American Transcendentalism. These moments are part of a signifcant transformation in which modernism is gradually absorbed into the romantic and perfectionist problematic. The third section draws attention to the philosophical and literary dimensions of Cavell's reading of modernism, showing how these themes are already present in his engagement with Wittgenstein and in his broader concern with the fate of language, expression, and tradition. By bringing Wittgenstein and modernist literature into dialogue—through a brief reference to Nabokov and Gombrowicz—I highlight the experience of loss and estrangement that characterizes modernism, but also the possibilities for world-creation and self-recovery that emerge from within this crisis.

The Discipline of the Diary

Joseph Jenkins was born at Llanfihangel Ystrad in Cardiganshire in 1818. He arrived in Australia in March 1869, at the age of 51, and worked in the Ballarat and Castlemaine regions as an itinerant labourer, before securing a steady job in 1885 cleaning drains for Maldon Shire Council. He began his diary in Wales in 1839, continued it in Australia until he returned home in 1894, and carried it on thereafter almost up to his death in 1898, probably making 58 volumes in all over his lifetime. The Australian section comprises 25 annual volumes, maintained regularly and almost without interruption for a quarter of a century, regardless of long working hours, fatigue, ill health and hospitalisation. Jenkins worked 12 or 14 hours per day, six days a week, year after year and not even Sundays and holidays were entirely his own when stables had to be cleaned and horses prepared for his master's use. Nevertheless, the diary imposed a relentless discipline and survived all Jenkins’ vicissitudes. ‘Not a blank day can be found’, he boasted and, remarkably enough, it is almost true.1 There is a three-month lacuna in 1886, when intruders destroyed some of his possessions, and there are some occasional short gaps (in April 1871, November 1886, October 1889 and April 1890) but these never lasted more than a few days.3 The longevity of the diary, and the assiduity with which he completed it every day, make Jenkins an exceptional Australian writer.

On Tim’s eighteenth birthday we are over at York and Auntie Lorraine rings Mum to say Daliak is burning and we go out and there is the thick inky cynical burgeoning mushroom cloud close by, driven away by the easterlies but so close, so very close we can touch if not smell it, though Guru can, he can smell burning as a reversal of flow, and we all know that if the wind shifts direction, and that even if it doesn’t, a slow reaching out against its inclination is its own logic as everything is different for fire and its ratiocination: it will want whatever is dry and unburnt that is flammable to reach back to widen the critical area against the winds inciting enflaming turning to ash—and knowing this, fire’s own advice, the fire plan is enacted and immediate action taken, preparation to evacuate shifting tense, the future only valid as the conditions, the fire’s urges.

—JK

The study of Australian ego-documents has raised the curtain on a cast of very varied and impressive characters in a wide range of settings. We have looked in on secret readings of The Lady of the Camelias in a Queensland women's prison; stockmen discussing Herodotus around the campfire; First Nations people composing a collective petition to Queen Victoria; and some surprisingly assiduous and consistent diarists. Most of the evidence has illuminated the cultural landscape of settler society. As far as possible, however, the study has also embraced the reading and writing of the dispossessed and the unsettled – itinerant workers without a home. Diaries, correspondence and autobiographical documents have not simply emphasised the well-known Britishness of colonial society, but they have also offered insights into the detailed contents of that allegiance in terms of readers’ tastes and responses. They returned repeatedly to Shakespeare, Scott and Dickens; they loved and recited some of the Romantic poets, Shelley rather than Keats, Byron rather than Wordsworth. Australian readers demonstrated their love of the English literary canon, which marked their cultural identity and reflected their loyalty to the British Empire. At the same time, this study has registered in their writing their profound sense of displacement, the pain of separation and their longing for home.

They did not read the canon slavishly or uncritically, however, and this study has noted the Australian inflexions of their choices and responses as readers. I have underlined examples of resistance to the mainstream literary tastes of colonial society, which is most obvious when considering social groups who were subordinate or marginal to settler society, namely convicts and First Nations people.

I realize that what I have been doing is trying to articulate an aetiology of the quiddity and materiality each participant in a collaboration ‘brings to the table’. Collaboration has been the key to generative practice for me since about 1990 when I worked with the artist Mona Ryder on a project of art and text for the PICA Bookworks exhibition. The most difficult thing about collaboration is giving up ourselves to the moment of exchange. Indeed, so deep-seated is the ownership of ‘ideas’ and more especially the personal usage and experentiality of the ideas in action, that I have had some people de-collaborate after a work is finished: that is, take their work, or parts of the mutual work, separate it off and use it in their personalized subjective spaces. This has never bothered me in itself – we are all part of a movement of ideas and one necessarily moves towards others to make works together because some kind of conceptual overlap is identified by each in each. I think ideas can be co-determinous between their intactness (and changeability) as ideas, and their embodiment in an individual. Yes, we’re struggling with post-Enlightenment issues of Western-impacted subjectivity, but that’s reductive: it is ‘procreation’ and survival, it is searching for purpose, it is working to give primacy of ideas that might ‘help’. That’s belief and faith in knowledge in one.

You make music, and your hands, wrists, and fngers are exceedingly important to you. This is natural and inevitable, but also paradoxical: you must think about your hands, wrists, and fngers; and you also must stop thinking about your hands, wrists, and fngers. Fretting, worrying, and obsessing about your hands isn't good. But sensing, celebrating, and enjoying your hands is good! Concentrating on your hands at the risk of not being attentive to the music itself isn't good. But allowing the hands to respond to a musical stimulus is very, very good!

Let's see what we can do about it.

Newborn, baby, toddler, kindergartner: the child is forever making discoveries. Everything is new, everything is worthy of the child's attention, everything is fascinating and wonderful—unless it's incomprehensible and terrifying. A toddler notices her shadow for the frst time, and she panics: What is this horrible thing that's following me around? Is it trying to kill me? Discovery is an exciting energy like no other. Our job is to live in wonderment, with the excitement of discovery not hampered by habit, routine, inat-tention, cynicism, or any of those troublesome adult emotions that are foreign to the baby.

Here’s the exercise: watch the hands of babies and young children at play.

Tender little fngers, agile, intelligent, sometimes already structured: a baby with “pianist’s hands,” space between the fngers, curved fngers ready to approach the keyboard.

‘sombre woods’

The Argonautica

With settler familiarity the forest is brow-beaten by four-wheel drives and pig hunters. Pigs are the lament-excuse-justification for blood-letting, a way around circumventions. And then there’s the farm turned into a minefield—a mine in a field, or rather the exploratory drills for a mine in a field that will dilate into the forest if the company has its way with relevant government agencies— the lamenting and unravelling of ‘green tape’. In case you shoulder wonder about deployments of language for investors, try ‘Gonneville Intrusion’ as the name for these activities. Or, ‘strategic deposit’ of ‘critical minerals.’ Intrusion strategic critical deposit. And ‘expand footprint’. Definition. Seven rigs—diamond and reverse circulation. Farmland entrée. And then… and then the full run of revelation with missionary zeal.

And this poem-addendum to petition that lives in the mind of the forest and its readers—the wandoo and jarrah and marri trees in full awareness of what lies beneath in the ‘complex’, speaking with words that will be extinguished before they can find a way past investor vocabularies, before they can upset degrees of separation, the consequences of portfolios. Oh, blue leschenaultia

Trying to formulate a response to John Kinsella’s ‘Sacred Kingfisher and Oblong Turtles’ poem has triggered a small existential crisis for me: small but perhaps not entirely insignificant, because it pertains to signification and significance. The crisis has two central components.

In part, and this is the first component, it’s a question of how to respond appropriately to such a work, and about the meaning or point of such a response.

It would be entirely feasible to write an academic essay on the piece, analysing it and laying bare its workings. The poem operates with a number of overlaid templates of linked metaphors. One is that of photography, and the idea of ‘exposure’, partly derived from the photos taken by the poet-speaker’s son of some oblong turtles seen at the coal dam; this resonates with the work of the sun rays, which is part of an natural economy, albeit an impended one, of light, as the sun interacts with the lake biotope that is the turtles and kingfishers’ natural breeding environment; but it also resonates, less optimistically, to the deadly exposure of the turtles to the world of mechanized humanity. Then there is a layer of meditations on ‘montage’, that is to say, not just the spatial economy of juxtaposition, but also the temporal economy of rupture and apposition of fragmented shards of time that have been jolted out of their supposedly sequential flow and jammed up against each other in something resembling a Benjaminian dialectic of contradiction.