It's my decided view at the moment that one huge lump of manifold Australian culture is utilitarian unassumingness. Withholding and withstanding, with/with and holding and standing. An old person doing a hand stand. Epistemological to the point of youth and freedom that is wasted on the old.
A lack of ontology. The large thing that is large is not only an icon of holiday proportion - it's the Big Other. A kind of psychological Big Brother but more about Darwinian anxieties of status where difference is equalised into a flat epistemology but which is though not identical to pluralist egalitarianism.. Some of you would know that in psychoanalysis the disappearance of the Big Other is the end of analysis. If you don't have that big other to overshadow you as monster master signifier you're old and free.
The artistry is then to assume this unassumingness for adaptive success in the wide flat epistemology where withholding and withstanding are not only a stoic badge of courage but a willingness for oppression as mark of physical strength. Mental strength is slowly entering into the equation but only because of the hidden fact that most of our flat epistemology have quietly gone through mental illness and will joke with Robert Welsh that you're suspicious too but withholding is paradoxically ill enough to legislate culturally "I don't know how to have an internal life". Ontology being just silence.
It's why Australian poetry is rural, pastoral as a guide. To tease an ontology is the quiet. The culturally integrated voice of David Malouf, the collegiality of quiet consensus by creeks. That tender rare masculinity - that by its rareness connotes value. Quiet is the value and so thus is unassumingness. I guess in the spirit of Lacan the end of the not-necessarily-Orwellian big Other is not self-same as party time. It's the quiet of Curlewis Creek or the mute boy in an Imaginary Life - you're either told to shut the fuck up or more integratively, be a linguistic gem, the strong silent type with women falling all over you - cute fantasy from an Imaginary Life...
Why quiet I don't know. Is there an audial tumult to this big cultural demographic I examine? Is loudness (via, say, cosmopolitanism) the denied term because of a cultural hyperacusis?
There's a millenium of monastical practice to bond cultural quietism - an entirety of nodding pastoral caring approval. Maybe the world isn't modern or the section I'm mentioning anyway. As quietism continues its cement march through corridors of power and it returns to the consensually agreed beginning of democracy - in Ancient Greece, where quiet was literally, political idiocy.
And I have no remedy, legal or philosophical. It means I also carry no poison. So the manifesto for the ontologizing of where I live which seems to have not much of it. Talking of being, as opposed to knowledge and technical stuff like how I put scoops on my Torana SLR vintage muscle car, is not the same as whinging or navel gazing unendingly uselessly. It's scientific. For a culture where loudness is a automobile motor yet research excellence is within Biology and it's offshoots like biomedicine and biomedical engineering. The cochlear implant - why Australian? Perhaps the cultural quietism....
The quietism, even with correlational philosophies of mind with Sam Harris and Daniel Dennett (now that's a huge guess so please feel free to delete at least Daniel's name but it won't affect the point), is much like the joke
"X is asked to pick one of three doors by Satan for his brimstone eternity. Door 1 sounds of chaos, 2 pain and screams, 3 though is a low quiet thrum. On being thrust into Door 3 X is up to his lower lip in shit and the others quietly say "don't make waves".
Opposing - Beckett says if you're up to your neck in shit you might as well sing. Scientifically - the peak wisdom of cultural quietism is the misguided mentoring of "observations affecting systems so please, no observations."
We are immersed in observation. Observation is actually fabric. There's no outside to it. It is embedded. Observation doesn't require what we call human - observation occurs whenever there are two electrons present. That is basically the whole universe except for modern experiments of atom splitting up to photon isolation requiring incredibly complex machines and more money than one countries defence budget - like the Large Hadron Collider.
So praising the engineer is kind of redundant but it does keep war and the global economy going and local culture understands the garage. But even an engineer would say - oh the Large Hadron Collider: the company who had the cheapest quote using the cheapest materials and labour got the contract, and heads shake. Back to fatal correct quietism even for the engineer. It all ends with a whimper sayeth TS Eliot.
Engineers are used to being told they're idiots, idios in the Ancient Greek, and become very quiet. The people who rebuke them are architects and scientists. Just ask them, any of them.
And what's being said is observation is ubiquitous. No need to hide heads in sand - we have to knowledge, we have the technology. Time to be ontological like they always were in cultures that pick up women easier than you.
Ontology, that is. Coming out of the Continent, the USA and UK.
And now - well Australia cos we are young and schweet
and yes, it's a project, the cultural ontologising of the fair wide brown land - not only cultural, scientific and philosophical but political as the experts become more and more bureaucratic and celebratedly cruel and big Othering to the law, and say, visa laws or land laws, employment laws and health laws
but hell, even engineers know you can change a law. Taking it all lying down is usually what's done but when they take the entitlement away of lying down and 4 weeks holidays, then navel gazing about science, quantum and being the best you can be cognitively or with wellbeing, is another way to be.
You know Frank Sinatra sing-sang that song well on the all the world's stages - dobedobedo too, Australia.
One ontological point at the moment, from Levi Bryant, is that difference actually makes being. No wonder, perhaps then, Australia never pondered ontology much, traditionally
