Ontologizing Australian Culture

It's funny - tokenism.

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

Anglo-Australian culture and mimesis

"You can tell a lot about a culture in the way they rhapsodize about their horses" - a corruption of a Mahatma Gandhi meat is murder quote.

There was movement at the station as the news had got around that the cold from Old Regret had got away...

The Man from Snowy River, The Song of Roland, Don Quixote, Equus, ...

and then there are the cultures that don't have horses.

Horses for courses. - In Anglo-Australian culture, the pasts of racism, the Black History, Empires of Eternal Sun, there are places of mass murder - and fair enough, they happen everywhere in colonisation, when they become part of the curriculum or of a nation's culture. I wonder if later high school they teach Australian History of Colonial Wars and Massacres. The mirror back is not nice, and thus the general anti-intellectualism of Anglo Australia. But they Anglo-Australia can tell a joke and mimick. I would celebrate this, the rough, and politically incorrect comedy of Rodney Rude and Kevin "Bloody" Wilson. If you turn the volume down, you hear nothing.

Come Fly With Me from the Little Britain comedians, has a skit with a racist Airport Internal Security Officer, questioning a new staff member of an airport shop.

"Where were you born? Pakistan??"
"No, Birmingham!"
"What about your parents??"
"Um Birmingham"
"Okay, your grandparents?"
"Yeah, Pakistan"
"So, if England played Pakistan in the cricket, who would you support?"
"I don't follow cricket, I like Wrestling!"

and the satirised contemporary security interrogation is scuttled and funny. It is mimesis - satirising racist mimickry and being self-reflective about it. This self-reflection is an ethical admission and that's why politically correct English can handle this comedy. - It is a re-embodied mimickry and will be Benny Hill in 10 years. Maybe why Benny Hill was loved by the French after leaving the UK might be something for you to consider.

Non-English listening Pakistani immigrants would just see interrogation. Potentially confusing, no? Present this surface reading to the self-reflective chortling socialist, they may worry and get the guilts again. Any comedy where you can turn they volume off and not see ostracisation is politically correct. The three stooges though are guys from the same culture - volume on or off, it's the same thing really. It's an artless physical humour working off schadenfreud. Schadenfreud and the goat - the best schadenfreud is when the misfortunate other is a cause of great misfortune themselves aka poetic justice - as if Hitler were the scapegoat. Michael Palin rhapsodized over Chile and Argentina for a reason.....he learnt the secret bound by death. He would have been killed on the spot but for his continuing global humanitarian services to the humours.


The white Australian comedy of mimickry as opposed to mimesis, is swell of Anglo-Australian culture. There is no groundswell though, unless if Anglo Australian culture is the culture of prison. A culture of dismissing, not the herd mentality of mimesis, but the undomesticated brumby packs of mimickry. In European modernity, mimesis is cautious of herd-mentality. Mimickry is environmental, not individual, the coo-ee needs the response. If you don't fit in easily, learn mimickry, respect the Austrlian accent, which is so culturally and internationally fragile in a global politics which works on sophisticated mimetic exchange. Anglo-Australians who realise that power in politics or culture where mimesis is the lingua franca - have got to come across  to a wild mimesis. Mimickry is funny and scapegoating. Watch the goats, they can consume anything, live in all lands. It is an ordinariness of living.

Sometimes cunts can be like this.



Mimesis is political and can be shot up, shot across, or shot down.

Mimickry is the kookaburra, is Rodney Rude's theory of how Vietnamese names came around. The Cronulla Riots was a cultural groundswell and is part of the mutation of Australian Multiculture as the ground.

Assimilation assumes one culture and conforming to this. Conforming to National Laws though I have no issue with.

Multiculturalism is damned. Multiculturalism is totally fucked. That is why it's the best, because it reflects what Australia has been since the end of World War II. Love the fuckedness. I speak as a wog though. The aboriginal people will have their own writing on this and I appreciate their general talk of connectedness to everything. It is what the West can't do, from the universal to the particular -- it's a worry for the gubbas. How aboriginal peoples engaged with the arrival of domesticated horses I would love to know.

Social Worker talk of "mainstreaming" gave Governments and institution a kudos of contemporary discourse which is in no way deserved or accurate, at all.

Fuck the social worker acronyms - CALD - Culturally and Linguistic Diverse. It's a funny and inappropriate word - because using only two terms as the focus of diversity in society is a malapropism. They are keeping their eyes on social diversity - all two of them.

Mimickry is earthly and earthy. Mimesis is earthly and domesticated. Come clean white feller, on the global political stage there are much smaller and less resource rich third world countries that have more political clout than Australia. Barry Humphries was good enough to coin a cultural cringe. In the Australian culture, there are many types of this. Thissy here is a fringe cringe.

Sydney is the greatest city in the World - Oprah 2010.

Wait for the horses to trample - horses for flat courses, brumbies for mountains