Academic literature on the topic 'Fraser, Pauline Criticism and interpretation'

<p>This article presents a criticism of Nancy Fraser’s influential essay “Behind Marx’s Hidden Abode. For an Expanded Conception of Capitalism”. After a short introduction determining Fraser’s theoretical stance amidst the critical waves around Karl Marx’s positions, her concept of “abodes”, thought to be hidden from Marx’s view of the capitalist order, is analyzed. Thereupon, certain limitations of her interpretation of the “economic” dimension in Marx’s work is pointed out, and also how they lead to misconceptions of the theory of the social formation as a whole. Furthermore, it is shown how Fraser is tempted to introduce ill-considered and alien elements into Marx’s view of the international economy (the world market), thereby rendering meaningless a Marxian concept of the political. Towards the end, the distinctively empiricist aura in which Fraser’s theory is presented is being criticized: It represents a rupture with any possible revolutionary theory.</p>

AbstractThis article, originally presented as the presidential address at the 2021 SNTS meeting, held virtually via Leuven due to Covid-19 conditions, investigates the nature of Pauline interpretation, past and present. It brings into the scholarly conversation a neglected ancient source, John Chrysostom's occasional homily on 1 Cor 7.2–4 (Hom. 1 Cor. 7–4 (CPG 4377)), and provides an analysis of key passages showing how the late antique orator-bishop seeks to turn Paul's words from the fifties to Corinth into a magical incantation, and, as inscribed on various materials, a talisman against the evils associated with porneia. The article concludes with defence of the category ‘Christian love magic’ and an argument that New Testament studies constitutes a unified field which should unite (rather than separate out) the work of philology, historical contextualisation, literary criticism, humanistic commitments and hermeneutical sophistication as we trace and analyse the ways human agents construct meanings with New Testament texts, then and now.

Abstract This study argues that a more attentive focus on the sociohistorical context of Paul's letters can lead to a fruitful theological exploration of Paul's theology that approximates fairly closely some of the key emphases of the Reformed/Lutheran tradition. Though the Reformation tradition of exegeting Paul's letters has properly grasped many of the central themes of Paul's theology, it has often lacked attention to historical particularity and social realism. Yet, a better grasp of the particulars can lead to a richer theological paradigm. As an example, this study examines Gal 2:11–21 with specific attention given to "works of law," "faith of Christ," and "righteousness" in order to demonstrate how one might shift from historical criticism to a theological interpretation within the Reformed/Lutheran tradition.

Abstract This study argues that a more attentive focus on the sociohistorical context of Paul's letters can lead to a fruitful theological exploration of Paul's theology that approximates fairly closely some of the key emphases of the Reformed/Lutheran tradition. Though the Reformation tradition of exegeting Paul's letters has properly grasped many of the central themes of Paul's theology, it has often lacked attention to historical particularity and social realism. Yet, a better grasp of the particulars can lead to a richer theological paradigm. As an example, this study examines Gal 2:11–21 with specific attention given to "works of law," "faith of Christ," and "righteousness" in order to demonstrate how one might shift from historical criticism to a theological interpretation within the Reformed/Lutheran tradition.

This comparative study of Islam and Christianity struggled to reveal the mutual meaningful expressions of God, the creator. The main question to which the article tried to answer is: Who is Jesus Christ for Paul and Muhammad(s)? The significance of countering to this question is being revealed much more through the contemporary issues of hate, and delusions that are influencing all believers in one God. Questioning the human nature and the Lordship of Christ looks like a barrier in dialogues between Islam and Christianity. So, as its primary purpose, Jesus, as the Lord from Paul’s perspective and Isa al-Masih, the son of Maryam from Muhammad’s(s) viewpoint, will be compared through different methods. Like the spiritual interpretation of Joel S. Goldsmith, in which the monotheistic presupposition (worshipping only one God), will implant the axial direction of the examination of the Bible and the Quran. Moreover, through historical criticism, the article will try to clarify the origins of faith in Pauline Christology compare to the doctrine of Tawhid from the Quran and the origin of the Quranic accounts of Christ. Also, through a feminist analysis, the essay will have a critical look at maleness of titles of God in Christianity. In this way, the historical analysis will display the urge of accepting the Quran as the Incarnated word of God for Islam and the importance of Paul as the best witness for Christ. By spiritual interpretation, the meaning of the “form” and the “face” of God in Christianity, and “face”, and the “Rope” of Allah and Al-Rahman in the Quran will validate a mutual notion of divinity for all believers. Also, through the feminist approach framed in the text of the Bible and the Quran, this research will spot the sexless status of the Incarnated Christ after the resurrection, the one who is the Lord of all now, even if is being praised in the new name of Al-Rahman. Thus, in conclusion, this article will suggest mutual findings in Quranic and Biblical Christology and will be ended by spotting the incarnation of the word of God, as the best point of starting a fruitful dialogue between Islam and Christianity.

The debate between AB du Toit and EP Sanders on Paul and Palestinian Judaism: The road ahead The aim of the article is to analyse the underlying structure of the critical reaction of AB du Toit against EP Sanders’s Pauline interpretation. It is shown that Du Toit’s criticism of Sanders rests on his identification of Paul’s opponents and their theology in Romans 4. This is questioned because of the dubious grounds on which his argument rests: the antithesis which is interpreted as polemical and the use of mirror reading. Secondly the underlying structures of their arguments are analysed. From this it becomes clear that there are hermeneutical and methodological differences between them which prevents Du Toit to do justice to Sanders’s interpretation. Lastly it is suggested that a movement away from a strictly ‘theological approach ’ to one which also takes the social context seriously, may be of much help in understanding what the historical Paul was saying.

Anyone contemplating the role of a “hermeneutics of suspicion” in literary and cultural studies must concede that the phrase is rarely used—even by its most devout practitioners, who usually think of themselves engaged in something called “critique.” What, then, are the terminological differences between “critique” and “the hermeneutics of suspicion”? What intellectual worlds do these specific terms conjure up, and how do these worlds converge or diverge? And what is the rationale for preferring one term over the other?The “hermeneutics of suspicion” is a phrase coined by Paul Ricoeur to capture a common spirit that pervades the writings of Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche. In spite of their obvious differences, he argued, these thinkers jointly constitute a “school of suspicion.” That is to say, they share a commitment to unmasking “the lies and illusions of consciousness;” they are the architects of a distinctively modern style of interpretation that circumvents obvious or self-evident meanings in order to draw out less visible and less flattering truths (Ricoeur 356). Ricoeur’s term has sustained an energetic after-life within religious studies, as well as in philosophy, intellectual history, and related fields, yet it never really took hold in literary studies. Why has a field that has devoted so much of its intellectual energy to interrogating, subverting, and defamiliarising found so little use for Ricoeur’s phrase?In general, we can note that hermeneutics remains a path not taken in Anglo-American literary theory. The tradition of hermeneutical thinking is rarely acknowledged (how often do you see Gadamer or Ricoeur taught in a theory survey?), let alone addressed, assimilated, or argued over. Thanks to a lingering aura of teutonic stodginess, not to mention its long-standing links with a tradition of biblical interpretation, hermeneutics was never able to muster the intellectual edginess and high-wattage excitement generated by various forms of poststructuralism. Even the work of Gianni Vattimo, one of the most innovative and prolific of contemporary hermeneutical thinkers, has barely registered in the mainstream of literary and cultural studies. On occasion, to be sure, hermeneutics crops up as a synonym for a discredited model of “depth” interpretation—the dogged pursuit of a hidden true meaning—that has supposedly been superseded by more sophisticated forms of thinking. Thus the ascent of poststructuralism, it is sometimes claimed, signaled a turn away from hermeneutics to deconstruction and genealogy—leading to a focus on surface rather than depth, on structure rather than meaning, on analysis rather than interpretation. The idea of suspicion has fared little better. While Ricoeur’s account of a hermeneutics of suspicion is respectful, even admiring, critics are understandably leery of having their lines of argument reduced to their putative state of mind. The idea of a suspicious hermeneutics can look like an unwarranted personalisation of scholarly work, one that veers uncomfortably close to Harold Bloom’s tirades against the “School of Resentment” and other conservative complaints about literary studies as a hot-bed of paranoia, kill-joy puritanism, petty-minded pique, and defensive scorn. Moreover, the anti-humanist rhetoric of much literary theory—its resolute focus on transpersonal and usually linguistic structures of determination—proved inhospitable to any serious reflections on attitude, disposition, or affective stance.The concept of critique, by contrast, turns out to be marred by none of these disadvantages. An unusually powerful, flexible and charismatic idea, it has rendered itself ubiquitous and indispensable in literary and cultural studies. Critique is widely seen as synonymous with intellectual rigor, theoretical sophistication, and intransigent opposition to the status quo. Drawing a sense of intellectual weightiness from its connections to the canonical tradition of Kant and Marx, it has managed, nonetheless, to retain a cutting-edge sensibility, retooling itself to fit the needs of new fields ranging from postcolonial theory to disability studies. Critique is contagious and charismatic, drawing everything around it into its field of force, marking the boundaries of what counts as serious thought. For many scholars in the humanities, it is not just one good thing but the only conceivable thing. Who would want to be associated with the bad smell of the uncritical? There are five facets of critique (enumerated and briefly discussed below) that characterise its current role in literary and cultural studies and that have rendered critique an exceptionally successful rhetorical-cultural actor. Critique, that is to say, inspires intense attachments, serves as a mediator in numerous networks, permeates disciplines and institutional structures, spawns conferences, essays, courses, and book proposals, and triggers countless imitations, translations, reflections, revisions, and rebuttals (including the present essay). While nurturing a sense of its own marginality, iconoclasm, and outsiderdom, it is also exceptionally effective at attracting disciples, forging alliances, inspiring mimicry, and ensuring its own survival. In “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam?” Bruno Latour remarks that critique has been so successful because it assures us that we are always right—unlike those naïve believers whose fetishes we strive to expose (225–48). At the same time, thanks to its self-reflexivity, the rhetoric of critique is more tormented and self-divided than such a description would suggest; it broods constantly over the shame of its own success, striving to detect signs of its own complicity and to root out all possible evidence of collusion with the status quo.Critique is negative. Critique retains the adversarial force of a suspicious hermeneutics, while purifying it of affective associations by treating negativity as an essentially philosophical or political matter. To engage in critique is to grapple with the oversights, omissions, contradictions, insufficiencies, or evasions in the object one is analysing. Robert Koch writes that “critical discourse, as critical discourse, must never formulate positive statements: it is always ‘negative’ in relation to its object” (531). Critique is characterised by its “againstness,” by its desire to take a hammer, as Latour would say, to the beliefs of others. Faith is to be countered with vigilant skepticism, illusion yields to a sobering disenchantment, the fetish must be defetishised, the dream world stripped of its befuddling powers. However, the negativity of critique is not just a matter of fault-finding, scolding, and censuring. The nay-saying critic all too easily calls to mind the Victorian patriarch, the thin-lipped schoolmarm, the glaring policeman. Negating is tangled up with a long history of legislation, prohibition and interdiction—it can come across as punitive, arrogant, authoritarian, or vitriolic. In consequence, defenders of critique often downplay its associations with outright condemnation. It is less a matter of refuting particular truths than of scrutinising the presumptions and procedures through which truths are established. A preferred idiom is that of “problematising,” of demonstrating the ungroundedness of beliefs rather than denouncing errors. The role of critique is not to castigate, but to complicate, not to engage in ideas’ destruction but to expose their cultural construction. Barbara Johnson, for example, contends that a critique of a theoretical system “is not an examination of its flaws and imperfections” (xv). Rather, “the critique reads backwards from what seems natural, obvious, self-evident, or universal in order to show that these things have their history” and to show that the “start point is not a (natural) given, but a (cultural) construct, usually blind to itself” (Johnson xv–xvi). Yet it seems a tad disingenuous to describe such critique as free of negative judgment and the examination of flaws. Isn’t an implicit criticism being transmitted in Johnson’s claim that a cultural construct is “usually blind to itself”? And the adjectival chain “natural, obvious, self-evident, or universal” strings together some of the most negatively weighted words in contemporary criticism. A posture of detachment, in other words, can readily convey a tacit or implicit judgment, especially when it is used to probe the deep-seated convictions, primordial passions, and heart-felt attachments of others. In this respect, the ongoing skirmishes between ideology critique and poststructuralist critique do not over-ride their commitment to a common ethos: a sharply honed suspicion that goes behind the backs of its interlocutors to retrieve counter-intuitive and uncomplimentary meanings. “You do not know that you are ideologically-driven, historically determined, or culturally constructed,” declares the subject of critique to the object of critique, “but I do!” As Marcelo Dascal points out, the supposedly non-evaluative stance of historical or genealogical argument nevertheless retains a negative or demystifying force in tracing ideas back to causes invisible to the actors themselves (39–62).Critique is secondary. A critique is always a critique of something, a commentary on another argument, idea, or object. Critique does not vaunt its self-sufficiency, independence, and autotelic splendor; it makes no pretense of standing alone. It could not function without something to critique, without another entity to which it reacts. Critique is symbiotic; it does its thinking by responding to the thinking of others. But while secondary, critique is far from subservient. It seeks to wrest from a text a different account than it gives of itself. In doing so, it assumes that it will meet with, and overcome, a resistance. If there were no resistance, if the truth were self-evident and available for all to see, the act of critique would be superfluous. Its goal is not the slavish reconstruction of an original or true meaning but a counter-reading that brings previously unfathomed insights to light. The secondariness of critique is not just a logical matter—critique presumes the existence of a prior object—but also a temporal one. Critique comes after another text; it follows or succeeds another piece of writing. Critique, then, looks backward and, in doing so, it presumes to understand the past better than the past understands itself. Hindsight becomes insight; from our later vantage point, we feel ourselves primed to see better, deeper, further. The belatedness of critique is transformed into a source of iconoclastic strength. Scholars of Greek tragedy or Romantic poetry may mourn their inability to inhabit a vanished world, yet this historical distance is also felt as a productive estrangement that allows critical knowledge to unfold. Whatever the limitations of our perspective, how can we not know more than those who have come before? We moderns leave behind us a trail of errors, finally corrected, like a cloud of ink from a squid, remarks Michel Serres (48). There is, in short, a quality of historical chauvinism built into critique, making it difficult to relinquish a sense of in-built advantage over those lost souls stranded in the past. Critique likes to have the last word. Critique is intellectual. Critique often insists on its difference from everyday practices of criticism and judgment. While criticism evaluates a specific object, according to one definition, “critique is concerned to identify the conditions of possibility under which a domain of objects appears” (Butler 109). Critique is interested in big pictures, cultural frameworks, underlying schema. It is a mode of thought well matched to the library and seminar room, to a rhythm of painstaking inquiry rather than short-term problem-solving. It “slows matters down, requires analysis and reflection, and often raises questions rather than providing answers” (Ruitenberg 348). Critique is thus irresistibly drawn toward self-reflexive thinking. Its domain is that of second-level observation, in which we reflect on the frames, paradigms, and perspectives that form and inform our understanding. Even if objectivity is an illusion, how can critical self-consciousness not trump the available alternatives? This questioning of common sense is also a questioning of common language: self-reflexivity is a matter of form as well as content, requiring the deployment of what Jonathan Culler and Kevin Lamb call “difficult language” that can undermine or “un-write” the discourses that make up our world (1–14). Along similar lines, Paul Bove allies himself with a “tradition that insists upon difficulty, slowness, complex, often dialectical and highly ironic styles,” as an essential antidote to the “prejudices of the current regime of truth: speed, slogans, transparency, and reproducibility” (167). Critique, in short, demands an arduous working over of language, a stoic refusal of the facile phrase and ready-made formula. Yet such programmatic divisions between critique and common sense have the effect of relegating ordinary language to a state of automatic servitude, while condescending to those unschooled in the patois of literary and critical theory. Perhaps it is time to reassess the dog-in-the-manger attitude of a certain style of academic argument—one that assigns to scholars the vantage point of the lucid and vigilant thinker, while refusing to extend this same capacity to those naïve and unreflecting souls of whom they speak.Critique comes from below. Politics and critique are often equated and conflated in literary studies and elsewhere. Critique is iconoclastic in spirit; it rails against authority; it seeks to lay bare the injustices of the law. It is, writes Foucault, the “art of voluntary insubordination, that of reflected intractability” (194). This vision of critique can be traced back to Marx and is cemented in the tradition of critical theory associated with the Frankfurt School. Critique conceives of itself as coming from below, or being situated at the margins; it is the natural ally of excluded groups and subjugated knowledges; it is not just a form of knowledge but a call to action. But who gets to claim the mantle of opposition, and on what grounds? In a well-known essay, Nancy Fraser remarks that critical theory possesses a “partisan though not uncritical identification” with oppositional social movements (97). As underscored by Fraser’s judicious insertion of the phrase “not uncritical,” critique guards its independence and reserves the right to query the actions and attitudes of the oppressed as well as the oppressors. Thus the intellectual’s affiliation with a larger community may collide with a commitment to the ethos of critique, as the object of a more heartfelt attachment. A separation occurs, as Francois Cusset puts it, “between academics questioning the very methods of questioning” and the more immediate concerns of the minority groups with which they are allied (157). One possible strategy for negotiating this tension is to flag one’s solidarity with a general principle of otherness or alterity—often identified with the utopian or disruptive energies of the literary text. This strategy gives critique a shot in the arm, infusing it with a dose of positive energy and ethical substance, yet without being pinned down to the ordinariness of a real-world referent. This deliberate vagueness permits critique to nurture its mistrust of the routines and practices through which the everyday business of the world is conducted, while remaining open to the possibility of a radically different future. Critique in its positive aspects thus remains effectively without content, gesturing toward a horizon that must remain unspecified if it is not to lapse into the same fallen state as the modes of thought that surround it (Fish 446).Critique does not tolerate rivals. Declaring itself uniquely equipped to diagnose the perils and pitfalls of representation, critique often chafes at the presence of other forms of thought. Ruling out the possibility of peaceful co-existence or even mutual indifference, it insists that those who do not embrace its tenets must be denying or disavowing them. In this manner, whatever is different from critique is turned into the photographic negative of critique—evidence of an irrefutable lack or culpable absence. To refuse to be critical is to be uncritical; a judgment whose overtones of naiveté, apathy, complacency, submissiveness, and sheer stupidity seem impossible to shrug off. In short, critique thinks of itself as exceptional. It is not one path, but the only conceivable path. Drew Milne pulls no punches in his programmatic riff on Kant: “to be postcritical is to be uncritical: the critical path alone remains open” (18).The exceptionalist aura of critique often thwarts attempts to get outside its orbit. Sociologist Michael Billig, for example, notes that critique thinks of itself as battling orthodoxy, yet is now the reigning orthodoxy—no longer oppositional, but obligatory, not defamiliarising, but oppressively familiar: “For an increasing number of younger academics,” he remarks, “the critical paradigm is the major paradigm in their academic world” (Billig 292). And in a hard-hitting argument, Talal Asad points out that critique is now a quasi-automatic stance for Western intellectuals, promoting a smugness of tone that can be cruelly dismissive of the deeply felt beliefs and attachments of others. Yet both scholars conclude their arguments by calling for a critique of critique, reinstating the very concept they have so meticulously dismantled. Critique, it seems, is not to be abandoned but intensified; critique is to be replaced by critique squared. The problem with critique, it turns out, is that it is not yet critical enough. The objections to critique are still very much part and parcel of the critique-world; the value of the critical is questioned only to be emphatically reinstated.Why do these protestations against critique end up worshipping at the altar of critique? Why does it seem so exceptionally difficult to conceive of other ways of arguing, reading, and thinking? We may be reminded of Eve Sedgwick’s comments on the mimetic aspect of critical interpretation: its remarkable ability to encourage imitation, repetition, and mimicry, thereby ensuring its own reproduction. It is an efficiently running form of intellectual machinery, modeling a style of thought that is immediately recognisable, widely applicable, and easily teachable. Casting the work of the scholar as a never-ending labour of distancing, deflating, and diagnosing, it rules out the possibility of a different relationship to one’s object. It seems to grow, as Sedgwick puts it, “like a crystal in a hypersaturated solution, blotting out any sense of the possibility of alternative ways of understanding or things to understand” (131).In this context, a change in vocabulary—a redescription, if you will—may turn out to be therapeutic. It will come as no great surprise if I urge a second look at the hermeneutics of suspicion. Ricoeur’s phrase, I suggest, can help guide us through the interpretative tangle of contemporary literary studies. It seizes on two crucial parts of critical argument—its sensibility and its interpretative method—that deserve more careful scrutiny. At the same time, it offers a much-needed antidote to the charisma of critique: the aura of ethical and political exemplarity that burnishes its negativity with a normative glow. Thanks to this halo effect, I’ve suggested, we are encouraged to assume that the only alternative to critique is a full-scale surrender to complacency, quietism, and—in literary studies—the intellectual fluff of aesthetic appreciation. Critique, moreover, presents itself as an essentially disembodied intellectual exercise, an austere, even abstemious practice of unsettling, unmaking, and undermining. Yet contemporary styles of critical argument are affective as well as analytical, conjuring up distinctive dispositions and relations to their object. As Amanda Anderson has pointed out in The Way We Argue Now, literary and cultural theory is saturated with what rhetoricians call ethos—that is to say, imputations of motive, character, or attitude. We need only think of the insouciance associated with Rortyan pragmatism, the bad-boy iconoclasm embraced by some queer theorists, or the fastidious aestheticism that characterises a certain kind of deconstructive reading. Critical languages, in other words, are also orientations, encouraging readers to adopt an affectively tinged stance toward their object. Acknowledging the role of such orientations in critical debate does not invalidate its intellectual components, nor does it presume to peer into, or diagnose, an individual scholar’s state of mind.In a related essay, I scrutinise some of the qualities of a suspicious or critical reading practice: distance rather than closeness; guardedness rather than openness; aggression rather than submission; superiority rather than reverence; attentiveness rather than distraction; exposure rather than tact (215–34). Suspicion, in this sense, constitutes a muted affective state—a curiously non-emotional emotion of morally inflected mistrust—that overlaps with, and builds upon, the stance of detachment that characterises the stance of the professional or expert. That this style of reading proves so alluring has much to do with the gratifications and satisfactions that it offers. Beyond the usual political or philosophical justifications of critique, it also promises the engrossing pleasure of a game-like sparring with the text in which critics deploy inventive skills and innovative strategies to test their wits, best their opponents, and become sharper, shrewder, and more sophisticated players. In this context, the claim that contemporary criticism has moved “beyond” hermeneutics should be treated with a grain of salt, given that, as Stanley Fish points out, “interpretation is the only game in town” (446). To be sure, some critics have backed away from the model of what they call “depth interpretation” associated with Marx and Freud, in which reading is conceived as an act of digging and the critic, like a valiant archaeologist, excavates a resistant terrain in order to retrieve the treasure of hidden meaning. In this model, the text is envisaged as possessing qualities of interiority, concealment, penetrability, and depth; it is an object to be plundered, a puzzle to be solved, a secret message to be deciphered. Instead, poststructuralist critics are drawn to the language of defamiliarising rather than discovery. The text is no longer composed of strata and the critic does not burrow down but stands back. Instead of brushing past surface meanings in pursuit of hidden truth, she dwells in ironic wonder on these surface meanings, seeking to “denaturalise” them through the mercilessness of her gaze. Insight, we might say, is achieved by distancing rather than by digging. Recent surveys of criticism often highlight the rift between these camps, underscoring the differences between the diligent seeker after buried truth and the surface-dwelling ironist. From a Ricoeur-inflected point of view, however, it is their shared investment in a particular ethos—a stance of knowingness, guardedness, suspicion and vigilance—that turns out to be more salient and more striking. Moreover, these approaches are variously engaged in the dance of interpretation, seeking to go beyond the backs of texts or fellow-actors in order to articulate non-obvious and often counter-intuitive truths. In the case of poststructuralism, we can speak of a second-order hermeneutics that is less interested in probing the individual object than the larger frameworks and conditions in which it is embedded. What the critic interprets is no longer a self-contained poem or novel, but a broader logic of discursive structures, reading formations, or power relations. Ricoeur’s phrase, moreover, has the singular advantage of allowing us to by-pass the exceptionalist tendencies of critique: its presumption that whatever is not critique can only be assigned to the ignominious state of the uncritical. As a less prejudicial term, it opens up a larger history of suspicious reading, including traditions of religious questioning and self-scrutiny that bear on current forms of interpretation, but that are occluded by the aggressively secular connotations of critique (Hunter). In this context, Ricoeur’s own account needs to be supplemented and modified to acknowledge this larger cultural history; the hermeneutics of suspicion is not just the brain-child of a few exceptional thinkers, as his argument implies, but a widespread practice of interpretation embedded in more mundane, diffuse and variegated forms of life (Felski 220).Finally, the idea of a suspicious hermeneutics does not invalidate or rule out other interpretative possibilities—ranging from Ricoeur’s own notion of a hermeneutics of trust to more recent coinages such as Sedgwick’s “restorative reading,” Sharon Marcus’s “just reading” or Timothy Bewes’s “generous reading.” Literary studies in France, for example, is currently experiencing a new surge of interest in hermeneutics (redefined as a practice of reinvention rather than exhumation) as well as a reinvigorated phenomenology of reading that elucidates, in rich and fascinating detail, its immersive and affective dimensions (see Citton; Macé). This growing interest in the ethos, aesthetics, and ethics of reading is long overdue. Such an orientation by no means rules out attention to the sociopolitical resonances of texts and their interpretations. It is, however, no longer willing to subordinate such attention to the seductive but sterile dichotomy of the critical versus the uncritical.ReferencesAnderson, Amanda. The Way We Argue Now: A Study in the Cultures of Theory. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2005.Asad, Talal. “Free Speech, Blasphemy, and Secular Criticism.” Is Critique Secular? Blasphemy, Injury, and Free Speech. Ed. Talal Asad, Wendy Brown, Judith Butler, and Saba Mahmood. Berkeley: Townsend Center for the Humanities, 2009. 20–63. Bewes, Timothy. “Reading with the Grain: A New World in Literary Studies.” Differences 21.3 (2010): 1–33.Billig, Michael. “Towards a Critique of the Critical.” Discourse and Society 11.3 (2000): 291–92. Bloom, Harold. The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1994.Bove, Paul. Mastering Discourse: The Politics of Intellectual Culture. Durham: Duke UP, 1992. Butler, Judith. “The Sensibility of Critique: Response to Asad and Mahmood.” Is Critique Secular? Blasphemy, Injury, and Free Speech. Ed. Talal Asad, Wendy Brown, Judith Butler, and Saba Mahmood. Berkeley: Townsend Center for the Humanities, 2009. 101–136.Citton, Yves. Lire, interpréter, actualiser: pourqoi les études littéraires? Paris: Editions Amsterdam, 2007. Culler, Jonathan and Kevin Lamb, “Introduction.” Just Being Difficult? Academic Writing in the Public Arena. Ed. Jonathan Culler and Kevin Lamb. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2003. 1–14. Cusset, Francois. French Theory: How Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, & Co. Transformed the Intellectual Life of the United States. Trans. Jeff Fort. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2008.Dascal, Marcelo. “Critique without Critics?” Science in Context 10.1 (1997): 39–62.Felski, Rita. “Suspicious Minds.” Poetics Today 32.2 (2011): 215–34.Fish, Stanley. Doing What Comes Naturally: Change, Rhetoric, and the Practice of Theory in Literary and Legal Studies. Durham: Duke UP, 1989.Foucault, Michel. “What is Critique?” The Political. Ed. David Ingram. Oxford: Blackwell, 2002. 191–211. Fraser, Nancy. “What’s Critical about Critical Theory? The Case of Habermas and Gender.” New German Critique 35 (1985): 97–131. Hunter, Ian. Rethinking the School: Subjectivity, Bureaucracy, Criticism. New York: St Martin’s Press, 1994.Johnson, Barbara. “Translator’s Introduction.” Jacques Derrida’s Dissemination. London: Continuum, 2004. vii–xxxv. Koch, Robert. “The Critical Gesture in Philosophy.” Iconoclash: Beyond the Image Wars in Science, Religion, and Art. Ed. Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel. Cambridge: MIT, 2002. 524–36. Latour, Bruno. “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern.” Critical Inquiry 30 (2004): 225–48.Macé, Marielle. Facons de lire, manières d’être. Paris: Gallimard, 2011. Marcus, Sharon. Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2007.Milne, Drew. “Introduction: Criticism and/or Critique.” Modern Critical Thought: An Anthology of Theorists Writing on Theorists. Oxford: Blackwell, 2002. 1–22. Ricoeur, Paul. Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation. New Haven: Yale UP, 1970. Ruitenberg, Claudia. “Don’t Fence Me In: The Liberation of Undomesticated Critique.” Journal of the Philosophy of Education 38.3 (2004): 314–50. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, Or, You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay is About You.” Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Durham: Duke UP, 2003. 123–52. Serres, Michel and Bruno Latour. Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time. Trans. Roxanne Lapidus. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1995.Vattimo, Gianni. Beyond Interpretation: The Meaning of Hermeneutics for Philosophy. Trans. David Webb. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1997.

Many films of the Australian New Wave (or Australian film renaissance) of the 1970s and 1980s can be defined as gothic, especially following Jonathan Rayner’s suggestion that “Instead of a genre, Australian Gothic represents a mode, a stance and an atmosphere, after the fashion of American Film Noir, with the appellation suggesting the inclusion of horrific and fantastic materials comparable to those of Gothic literature” (25). The American comparison is revealing. The 400 or so film productions of the Australian New Wave emerged, not in a vacuum, but in an increasingly connected and inter-mixed international space (Godden). Putatively discrete national cinemas weave in and out of each other on many levels. One such level concerns the reception critics give to films. This article will drill down to the level of the reception of two examples of Australian gothic film-making by two well-known American critics. Rayner’s comparison of Australian gothic with American film noir is useful; however, it begs the question of how American critics such as Pauline Kael and Andrew Sarris influentially shaped the reception of Australian gothic in America and in other locations (such as Australia itself) where their reviews found an audience either at the time or afterwards. The significance of the present article rests on the fact that, as William McClain observes, following in Rick Altman’s footsteps, “critics form one of the key material institutions that support generic formations” (54). This article nurtures the suggestion that knowing how Australian gothic cinema was shaped, in its infancy, in the increasingly important American market (a market of both commerce and ideas) might usefully inform revisionist studies of Australian cinema as a national mode. A more nuanced, globally informed representation of the origins and development of Australian gothic cinema emerges at this juncture, particularly given that American film reviewing in the 1970s and 1980s more closely resembled what might today be called film criticism or even film theory. The length of individual reviews back then, the more specialized vocabulary used, and above all the tendency for critics to assume more knowledge of film history than could safely be assumed in 2014—all this shows up the contrast with today. As Christos Tsiolkas notes, “in our age… film reviewing has been reduced to a thumbs-up or a thumbs-down” (56)! The 1970s and 1980s is largely pre-Internet, and critical voices such as Kael and Sarris dominated in print. The American reviews of Australian gothic films demonstrate how a different consciousness suffuses Kael’s and Sarris’s engagements with “Antipodean” (broadly Australian and New Zealand) cinema. Rayner’s locally specific definition of Australian gothic is distorted in their interpretations of examples of the genre. It will be argued that this is symptomatic of a particular blindspot, related to the politics and art of place, in the American reception of Wake in Fright (initially called Outback in America), directed by the Canadian Ted Kotcheff (1971) and The Year of Living Dangerously, directed by Peter Weir (1982). Space and argument considerations force this article to focus on the reviews of these films, engaging less in analysis of the films themselves. Suffice to say that they all fit broadly within Rayner’s definition of Australian gothic cinema. As Rayner states, three thematic concerns which permeate all the films related to the Gothic sensibility provide links across the distinctions of era, environment and character. They are: a questioning of established authority; a disillusionment with the social reality that that authority maintains; and the protagonist’s search for a valid and tenable identity once the true nature of the human environment has been revealed. (25) “The true nature of the human environment….” Here is the element upon which the American reviews of the Australian gothic founder. Explicitly in many films of this mode, and implicitly in nearly all of them, is the “human environment” of the Australian landscape, which operates less as a backdrop and more as a participating element, even a character, in the drama, saturating the mise-en-scène. In “Out of Place: Reading (Post) Colonial Landscapes as Gothic Space in Jane Campion’s Films,” Eva Rueschmann quotes Ross Gibson’s thesis from South of the West: Postcolonialism and the Narrative Construction of Australia that By featuring the land so emphatically… [Australian] films stake out something more significant than decorative pictorialism. Knowingly or unknowingly, they are all engaging with the dominant mythology of white Australia. They are all partaking of the landscape tradition which, for two hundred years, has been used by white Australians to promote a sense of the significance of European society in the “Antipodes”. (Rueschmann) The “emphatic” nature of the land in films like Wake in Fright, Mad Max 2 and Picnic at Hanging Rock actively contributes to the “atmosphere” of Australian gothic cinema (Rayner 25). This atmosphere floats across Australian film and literature. Many of the films mentioned in this article are adaptations from books, and Rayner himself stresses the similarity between Australian gothic and gothic literature (25). Significantly, the atmosphere of Australian gothic also floats across the fuzzy boundary between the gothic and road movies or road literature. Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior is obviously a road movie as well as a gothic text; so is Wake in Fright in its way; even Picnic at Hanging Rock contains elements of the road movie in all that travelling to and from the rock. Roads, then, are significant for Australian gothic cinema, for the road traverses the Australian (gothic) landscape and, in the opportunity it provides for moving through it at speed, tantalizes with the (unfulfillable) promise of an escape from its gothic horror. Australian roads are familiar, part of White European culture referencing the geometric precision of Roman roads. The Australian outback, by contrast, is unfamiliar, uncanny. Veined with roads, the outback invites the taming by “the landscape tradition” that it simultaneously rejects (Rueschmann). In the opening 360° pan of Wake in Fright the land frightens with its immensity and intensity, even as the camera displays the land’s “conquering” agent: not a road, but the road’s surrogate—a railway line. Thus, the land introduces the uncanny into Australian gothic cinema. In Freudian terms, the uncanny is that unsettling combination of the familiar and the unfamiliar. R. Gray calls it “the class of frightening things that leads us back to what is known and familiar” (Gray). The “frightening” land is the very condition of the “comforting” road; no roads without a space for roads, and places for them to go. In her introduction to The Penguin Book of the Road, Delia Falconer similarly sutures the land to the uncanny, linking both of these with the first peoples of the Australian land: "Of course there is another 'poetry of the earth' whispering from the edges of our roads that gives so many of our road stories an extra charge, and that is the history of Aboriginal presence in this land. Thousands of years of paths and tribal boundaries also account for the uncanny sense of being haunted that dogs our travellers on their journeys (xvii). White Australia, as the local saying goes, has a black past, played out across the land. The film The Proposition instances this, with its gothic portrayal of the uncanny encroachments of the Australian “wilderness” into the domain of “civilization”. Furthermore, “our” overweening literal and metaphoric investment in the traditional quarter-acre block, not to mention in our roads, shows that “we” haven’t reconciled either with the land of Australia or with its original inhabitants: the Aboriginal peoples. Little wonder that Kael and Sarris couldn’t do so, as White Americans writing some forty years ago, and at such a huge geographic remove from Australia. As will be seen, the failure of these American film critics to comprehend the Australian landscape comes out—as both a “critical reaction” and a “reactive compensation”—in two, interwoven strands of their interpretations of Australian New Wave gothic cinema. A repulsion from, and an attraction to, the unrecognized uncanny is evidenced. The first strand is constituted in the markedly anthropological aspect to the film reviews: anthropological elements of the text itself are either disproportionately magnified or longed for. Here, “anthropological” includes the sociological and the historical. Secondly, Kael and Sarris use the films they review from Australian gothic cinema as sites upon which to trial answers to the old and persistent question of how the very categories of art and politics relate. Initially sucked out of the reviews (strand one), politics and art thus rush back in (strand two). In other words, the American failure to engage deeply with the land triggers an initial reading of films like Wake in Fright less as films per se and more as primary texts or one-to-one documentations of Australia. Australia presents for anthropological, even scientific atomization, rather than as a place in active, creative and complex relationship with its rendering in mise-en-scène. Simultaneously though, the absence of the land nags—eats away at the edges of critical thinking—and re-emerges (like a Freudian return of the repressed) in an attempt by the American critics to exploit their film subjects as an opportunity for working out how politics and art (here cinema) relate. The “un-seen” land creates a mis-reading amongst the American critics (strand one), only to force a compensatory, if somewhat blindsided, re-reading (strand two). For after all, in this critical “over-looking” of the land, and thus of the (ongoing) Aboriginal existence in and with the land, it is politics and art that is most at stake. How peoples (indigenous, settler or hybrid peoples) are connected to and through the land has perhaps always been Australia’s principal political and artistic question. How do the American reviews speak to this question? Sarris did not review Wake in Fright. Kael reviewed it, primarily, as a text at the intersection of fiction and documentary, ultimately privileging the latter. Throughout, her critical coordinates are American and, to a degree, literary. Noting the “stale whiff of Conrad” she also cites Outback’s “additional interest” in its similarity with “recent American movies [about] American racism and capitalist exploitation and the Vietnam war” (415). But her most pointed intervention comes in the assertion that there is “enough narrative to hold the social material together,” as if this were all narrative were good for: scaffolding for sociology (416). Art and culture are left out. Even as Kael mentions the “treatment of the Aborigines,” she misses the Aboriginal cultural moment of the opening shot of the land; this terrain, she writes, is “without a trace of culture” (416). Then, after critiquing what she sees as the unconvincing lesson of the schoolteacher’s moral demise, comes this: “But a more serious problem is that (despite the banal photography) the semi-documentary aspects of the film are so much more vivid and authentic and original than the factitious Conradian hero that we want to see more of that material—we want to learn more” (416-417). Further on, in this final paragraph, Kael notes that, while “there have been other Australian films, so it’s not all new” the director and scriptwriter “have seen the life in a more objective way, almost as if they were cultural anthropologists…. Maybe Kotcheff didn’t dare to expand this vision at the expense of the plot line, but he got onto something bigger than the plot” (417). Kael’s “error”, as it were, is to over-look how the land itself stretches the space of the film, beyond plot, to occupy the same space as her so-called “something bigger”, which itself is filled out by the uncanniness of the land as the intersections of both indigenous and settler (road-based) cultures and their representations in art (417). The “banal photography” might be better read as the film’s inhabitation of these artistic/cultural intersections (416). Kael’s Wake in Fright piece illustrates the first strand of the American reviews of Australian gothic cinema. Missing the land’s uncanniness effectively distributes throughout the review an elision of culture and art, and a reactive engagement with the broadly anthropological elements of Kotcheff’s film. Reviews of The Year of Living Dangerously by Kael and Sarris also illustrate the first strand of the American-Australian reviewing nexus, with the addition, also by each critic, of the second strand: the attempt to reconnect and revitalize the categories of politics and art. As with Wake in Fright, Kael introduces an anthropological gambit into Weir’s film, privileging its documentary elements over its qualities as fiction (strand one). “To a degree,” she writes, “Weir is the victim of his own skill at creating the illusion of authentic Third World misery, rioting, and chaos” (454). By comparison with “earlier, studio-set films” (like Casablanca [452]), where such “backgrounds (with their picturesque natives) were perfectly acceptable as backdrops…. Here… it’s a little obscene” (454). Kael continues: “Documentaries, TV coverage, print journalism, and modern history itself have changed audiences’ responses, and when fake dilemmas about ‘involvement’ are cooked up for the hero they’re an embarrassment” (454-455). Film is pushed to cater to anthropology besides art. Mirroring Kael’s strand-one response, Sarris puts a lot of pressure on Weir’s film to “perform” anthropologically—as well as, even instead of, artistically. The “movie”, he complains “could have been enjoyed thoroughly as a rousingly old-fashioned Hollywood big-star entertainment were it not for the disturbing vistas of somnolent poverty on view in the Philippines, the location in which Indonesian poverty in 1965 was simulated” (59). Indeed, the intrusive reality of poverty elicits from Sarris something very similar to Kael’s charge of the “obscenity of the backdrop” (454): We cannot go back to Manderley in our movie romances. That much is certain. We must go forward into the real world, but in the process, we should be careful not to dwarf our heroes and heroines with the cosmic futility of it all. They must be capable of acting on the stage of history, and by acting, make a difference in our moral perception of life on this planet. (59) Sarris places an extreme, even outrageous, strand-one demand on Weir’s film to re-purpose its fiction (what Kael calls “romantic melodrama” [454]) to elicit the categories of history and anthropology—that last phrase, “life on this planet”, sounds like David Attenborough speaking! More so, anthropological atomization is matched swiftly to a strand-two demand, for this passage also anticipates the rapprochement of politics and art, whereby art rises to the level of politics, requiring movie “heroes and heroines” to make a “moral difference” on a historical if not on a “cosmic” level (59). It is precisely in this, however, that Weir’s film falls down for Sarris. “The peculiar hollowness that the more perceptive reviewers have noted in The Year of Living Dangerously arises from the discrepancy between the thrilling charisma of the stars and the antiheroic irrelevance of the characters they play to the world around them” (59). Sarris’s spatialized phrase here (“peculiar hollowness”) recalls Kael’s observation that Wake in Fright contains “something bigger than the plot” (417). In each case, the description is doubling, dis-locating—uncanny. Echoing the title of Eva Rueschmann’s article, both films, like the Australian landscape itself, are “out of place” in their interpretation by these American critics. What, really, does Sarris’s “peculiar hollowness” originate in (59)? In what “discrepancy” (59)? There is a small but, in the context of this article, telling error in Sarris’s review of Weir’s film. Kael, correctly, notes that “the Indonesian settings had to be faked (in the Philippines and Australia)” (inserted emphasis) (452). Sarris mentions only the Philippines. From little things big things grow. Similar to how Kael overlooks the uncanny in Wake in Fright’s mise-en-scène, Sarris “sees” a “peculiar hollowness” where the land would otherwise be. Otherwise, that is, in the perspective of a cinema (Kotcheff’s, Weir’s) that comprehends “the true nature of the [Australian, gothic] human environment” (Rayner 25). Of course, it is not primarily a matter of how much footage Weir shot in Australia. It is the nature of the cinematography that matters most. For his part, Sarris damns it as “pretentiously picturesque” (59). Kael, meanwhile, gets closer perhaps to the ethics of the uncanny cinematography of The Year of Living Dangerously in her description of “intimations, fragments, hints and portents… on a very wide screen” (451). Even so, it will be remembered, she does call the “backgrounds… obscene” (454). Kael and Sarris see less than they “see”. Again like Sarris, Kael goes looking in Weir’s film for a strand-two rapprochement of politics and art, as evidenced by the line “The movie displays left-wing attitudes, but it shows no particular interest in politics” (453). It does though, only Kael is blind to it because she is blind to the land and, equally, to the political circumstances of the people of the land. Kael likely never realized the “discrepancy” in her critique of The Year of Living Dangerously’s Billy Kwan as “the same sort of in-on-the-mysteries-of-the-cosmos character that the aborigine actor Gulpilil played in Weir’s 1977 The Last Wave” (455). All this, she concludes, “might be boiled down to the mysticism of L.A.: ‘Go with the flow’” (455)! Grouping characters and places together like this, under the banner of L.A. mysticism, brutally erases the variations across different, uncanny, gothic, post-colonial landscapes. It is precisely here that politics and art do meet, in Weir’s film (and Kotcheff’s): in the artistic representation of the land as an index of the political relations of indigenous, settler and hybrid communities. (And not down the rabbit hole of the “specifics” of politics that Kael claims to want [453]). The American critics considered in this article are not in “bad faith” or a-political. Sarris produced a perceptive, left-leaning study entitled Politics and Cinema, and many of Kael’s reviews, along with essays like “Saddle Sore: El Dorado, The War Wagon, The Way West,” contain sophisticated, liberalist analyses of the political circumstances of Native Americans. The crucial point is that, as “critics form[ing] one of the key material institutions that support generic formations,” Sarris and Kael impacted majorly on the development of Australian gothic cinema, in the American context—impacted especially, one could say, on the (mis-)understanding of the land-based, uncanny politics of this mode in its Australian setting (McClain 54). Kael’s and Sarris’s reviews of My Brilliant Career, along with Judith Maslin’s review, contain traits similar to those considered in depth in the reviews studied above. Future research might usefully study this significant impact more closely, weaving in an awareness of the developing dynamics of global film productions and co-productions since the 1970s, and thereby focusing on Australian gothic as international cinema. Was, for example, the political impact of later films like The Proposition influenced, even marginally, by the (mis-)readings of Sarris and Kael? In conclusion here, it suffices to note that, even as the American reviewers reduced Australian cinema art to “blank” documentary or “neutral” anthropology, nevertheless they evidenced, in their strand-two responses, the power of the land (as presented in the cinematography and mise-en-scène) to call out—across an increasingly globalized domain of cinematic reception—for the fundamental importance of the connection between politics and art. Forging this connection, in which all lands and the peoples of all lands are implicated, should be, perhaps, the primary and ongoing concern of national and global cinemas of the uncanny, gothic mode, or perhaps even any mode. References Casablanca. Dir. Michael Curtiz. Warner Bros, 1942. Falconer, Delia. “Introduction.” The Penguin Book of the Road. Ed. Delia Falconer. Melbourne: Viking-Penguin Books, 2008. xi-xxvi. Gibson, Ross. South of the West: Postcolonialism and the Narrative Construction of Australia. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1992. Godden, Matt. “An Essay on Australian New Wave Cinema.” 9 Jan. 2013. 18 Aug. 2014 ‹http://www.golgotha.com.au/2013/01/09/an-essay-on-australian-new-wave-cinema/›. Gray, R. “Freud, ‘The Uncanny.’” 15 Nov. 2013. 18 Aug. 2014 ‹http://courses.washington.edu/freudlit/Uncanny.Notes.html›. Kael, Pauline. “Australians.” Review of My Brilliant Career. 15 Sep. 1980. Taking It All In. London: Marion Boyars, 1986. 54-62. Kael, Pauline. “Literary Echoes—Muffled.” Review of Outback [Wake in Fright]. 4 March 1972. Deeper into Movies. Boston: Atlantic Monthly Press-Little, Brown and Company, 1973. 413-419. Kael, Pauline. “Saddle Sore: El Dorado, The War Wagon, The Way West.” Kiss Kiss Bang Bang. London: Arrow Books, 1987. 38-46. Kael, Pauline. “Torrid Zone.” Review of The Year of Living Dangerously. 21 Feb. 1983. Taking It All In. London: Marion Boyars, 1986. 451-456. Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior. Dir. George Miller. Warner Bros, 1981. Maslin, Janet. “Film: Australian ‘Brilliant Career’ by Gillian Armstrong.” Review of My Brilliant Career. New York Times (6 Oct. 1979.): np. McClain, William. “Western, Go Home! Sergio Leone and the ‘Death of the Western’ in American Film Criticism.” Journal of Film and Video 62.1-2 (Spring/Summer 2010): 52-66. My Brilliant Career. Dir. Gillian Armstrong. Peace Arch, 1979. Picnic at Hanging Rock. Dir. Peter Weir. Picnic Productions, 1975. Rayner, Jonathan. Contemporary Australian Cinema: An Introduction. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000. Rueschmann, Eva. “Out of Place: Reading (Post) Colonial Landscapes as Gothic Space in Jane Campion’s Films.” Post Script (22 Dec. 2005). 18 Aug. 2014 ‹http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Out+of+place%3A+reading+%28post%29+colonial+landscapes+as+Gothic+space+in...-a0172169169›. Sarris, Andrew. “Films in Focus.” Review of My Brilliant Career. Village Voice (4 Feb. 1980): np. Sarris, Andrew. “Films in Focus: Journalistic Ethics in Java.” Review of The Year of Living Dangerously. Village Voice 28 (1 Feb. 1983): 59. Sarris, Andrew. “Liberation, Australian Style.” Review of My Brilliant Career. Village Voice (15 Oct. 1979): np. Sarris, Andrew. Politics and Cinema. New York: Columbia University Press, 1978. The Last Wave. Dir. Peter Weir. Ayer Productions, 1977. The Proposition. Dir. John Hillcoat. First Look Pictures, 2005. The Year of Living Dangerously. Dir. Peter Weir. MGM, 1982. Tsiolkas, Christos. “Citizen Kael.” Review of Pauline Kael: A Life in the Dark by Brian Kellow. The Monthly (Feb. 2012): 54-56. Wake in Fright. Dir. Ted Kotcheff. United Artists, 1971.

The loop is one of the primary means of structuration for electronic music from mainstream to avant-garde styles. Indeed, during forums at the recent 2002 AD Analogue 2 Digital event, organised as part of the Adelaide Fringe Festival, many practitioners of electronic music gathered together and, often, quizzed each other about the loop: why does everybody seem to be using it and just how useful is it? With very few exceptions, the loop was considered to be an important if not essential tool for electronic music, and it is perhaps easy to understand why if one considers the "one-man band" nature of the majority of purely electronic music. Moreover, the loop is a trope common in many forms of contemporary music such as disco, minimalism, funk and hip-hop, all of which, as David Toop writes, "explor[e] entrancing elaborations and variations on repetition" (92). While Western musical forms have, for many centuries, been characterised by recurring elements (pedal notes, refrains, choruses, variations and so on are all musical tropes that rely on the recurrence of repetitive elements), there is perhaps a difference in the kind of repetition that is deployed in many of these musical forms and that deployed in consumer-driven and much avant-garde electronic music. When looping elements return in many pre-electronic (or non-electronic) compositions they present an elaborated form of the original iteration of that element, whereas it can be argued that the break in hip-hop or the loop employed by electronic music forms a stable basis on which other changing, shifting, modulating and developing elements are laid. (It should not of course be surmised from this that all hip-hop uses breaks nor that all electronic music uses loops.) Rather than presenting an active repetitive element creating difference in itself, the kind of looping employed in much electronic music proposes a banal, Platonic form of repetition in which, as Deleuze states, "the model is supposed to enjoy an originary superior identity [...] whereas the copy is judged in terms of a derived internal resemblance" (126-127). In the terms of our discussion, then, the sampled fragment of music or break (the "original" which some take endless pleasure in trying to identify) constitutes an originary identity which is repeated or looped in a form identical to itself to create an absolute internal resemblance across a contiguous whole. This reading of looping in electronic music finds extension in Jean-Charles François's criticism that electronic music produces only trigger timbre. François argues that in electronic music, the "performer is reduced to a triggering device, and does not participate in any real physical production of the sound" as opposed to the dynamic timbre of "traditional" acoustic instruments which can be varied by the performer in an interpretation of a work ("Fixed Timbre" 113). Trigger timbre, then, signals the exact reproduction (or, rather, a copy with internal resemblance, for an exact reproduction is an impossibility for a number of reasons, some philosophical, some temporal, some physical) of a prior moment, an originary identity, a movement analogous to that created by the looped element in electronic music. The problem with this in regards to musical production as artistic creation is that such modes of structuration are, according to François and Deleuze, eminently un-artistic or un-musical. For François, trigger timbre "strikes our ears like a symbol and threatens the essence of pure music" ("Fixed Timbre" 116), whilst for Deleuze a model employing banal repetition such as the repetition of a decorative motif "is not how artists proceed in reality. They do not juxtapose instances of the figure, but rather each time combine an element of one instance with another element of a following instance" (19). It might then be argued that electronic music is doubly prone to a Platonic mode of production removed from artistry, devoid of the desire with which, for Deleuze, all artistic creation is necessarily injected. To do so, however, is to propose a technologically determinist argument which maintains that electronic music is shaped by the very technology available to the artist, and emphasises the role of the engineer over the artist (even when the engineer and the artist are one and the same person, as is often the case in such music). That such a technologically determinist view might be levelled against electronic music is, nonetheless, perhaps not surprising since whilst most composers of any genre using acoustic instruments essentially have a set of instruments to draw on that has been relatively stable for a number of years (how many years will depend on the genre), it might be suggested that many electronic artists remain within the bounds of their tools' immediate and obvious possibilities because they do not have time fully to master them because the technology behind electronic music is still developing at an exponential rate. Whilst this is in many respects a gross overgeneralisation that neglects composers from both acoustic genres such as Luigi Russolo and Harry Partch who invented new instruments to broaden their sonic palette as well as electronic artists such as Kraftwerk or Aphex Twin who built or radically modified / deconstructed their own instruments, I do not think it entirely unfair given the technophile nature of many electronic artists, eager to keep abreast of the latest developments and software or hardware releases, and believe that it goes some way towards explaining the rate at which "movements" arise and disappear in contemporary electronic music. None of this would be of the least concern, of course, if this did not imply that the music made by many electronic artists is created as much by the hands of the engineer (and by engineer I refer not simply to a recording engineer but anyone involved in the development or programming of the hardware or software used for electronic) as in those of the artist. Even for those artists who serve as their own engineer, then, it is sometimes the case that their productions' bounds of possibility are determined not only by the artist's imagination but also by the very hardware and software used. Electronic music can, then, fall prey to technological determinism, can function in a Platonic manner, relying on a priori principles encoded in its tools and deploying banal repetition, and can be negatively critiqued in the terms of François's argument. This does not imply by any means, however, that it must be so. Indeed, in both her workshop and performance at the 2002AD conference, Kaffe Matthews proposed ways in which this quandary might be broached. Matthews takes her samples not from pre-existing recordings or intricately programmed "timbre objects" ("Fixed Timbre" 114), but from the "live" environmental sounds of the venue in which she is playing or the surrounding area. In this way, Matthews does not merely produce an exact repetition of an historical or prior moment (the sentimental potential of recorded media and electronic music which, according to François, explains their seductive power and thus popularity (François 1990, 114)), rather ensuring that every performance will indeed be an interpretation, a live performance which has no originary identity to refer back to or repeat. To build a complete musical text from fragments such as this, Matthews does rely on the loop, but one of the primary means that she uses to create her loops does not rely on the pattern of banal repetition observed above. Rather, Matthews places microphones around the venue in which she is playing and into which, therefore, her work is being amplified, so that the work itself is looped back into itself, each successive iteration of the loop being altered by the shifting acoustics of the environment into which it is emitted. In this manner, the entire venue is used as the "resonant cavity", the "giant membrane", the "environment", the "atmosphere" that render possible a discursive structure and that, for François, are the preserve of true timbre which cannot be produced by electronic technology ("Writing" 16). This is not, of course, the first time that such loops have been used in experimental music: the notion of the loop is very frequent in the work from the 1960s and 1970s of Steve Reich, who lets series of loops fall into and out of phase with each other, Terry Riley and Pauline Oliveros. Perhaps the most significant precursor to Kaffe Matthews's approach, however, is Alvin Lucier's I am Sitting in a Room (1969). For this piece, the performer chooses the room whose musical qualities are to be evoked, then reads a text in that room. The recording is played back through a loudspeaker in the room, the playback itself recorded and amplified again with the original recording, the process being repeated over a number of generations. Lucier's piece and, indeed, all of the pieces employing loops by the aforementioned composers, use analogue tape technology in order to create their loops, however, which is to say that a deliberate manipulation of the hardware that rips it from its normalised and intended use is required for that hardware to create loops. This is not to say that the misuse of technology at one's disposal is particularly revolutionary; indeed, one might claim that it is a very common feature among avant-garde or progressive artists of the past and present in all musical genres using both digital, analogue, electro-acoustic and acoustic instruments — should Oval do that to compact disks? isn't that the wrong direction for a record to spin? did anyone really intend Hendrix to play a guitar like that? did Cage actually know how a piano should be played? does Jim Denley actually know how to play the flute? What this does suggest, however, is that the use of loops in the work of these artists in the 60s and 70s was the result of a willed aesthetic decision and not a mode of construction dictated by the bounds of the immediately possible hardwired into the technology being used. If the loop used as one of the primary means of structuration in electronic music is to escape the technologically determinist arguments seen above, then, its coming into being must similarly be the result of a willed aesthetic decision and not merely a symptom of the technology used to produce it; it must, in other words, be infused with an artistic sensibility. Much electronic music being pumped out of bedrooms and studios at an alarming rate, however, is not infused with this kind of artistic sensibility, a situation which, although I oversimplify once more in saying so, would only appear to be aggravated the closer one moves to the mainstream (hence phenomena such as "the Balearic sound"). By its nature more prone to banal Platonic repetition (because of the primacy of the loop) and the a-dynamism (and, by inference, stultification) of trigger timbre, those sections of the electronic music scene who are content merely to remain within the obvious uses of the music-making technology, whether their démarche is born of a desire to pander to market forces or an inability or unwillingness fully to master the technology offered because of the speed at which it is moving, consequently produce songs which are themselves little more than banal copies of each other. Constructing music around loops within a technological domain that no longer requires hardware manipulation for the creation of loops since the loop is encoded within it, Matthews, however, by integrating into this realm the kind of compositional démarche noted in Lucier, liberates electronic music from these pitfalls. More than this, however, her approach also allows for an improvisational and dynamic aesthetic which is uncommon even in the avant-garde of electronic artists who do extend the possibilities of the technology they use. For the majority of artists who can be included in this group generally rely, when processing samples in real time, on a bank of pre-recorded samples, regardless of how these were created, through the use or misuse of technology. In using the very space in or around where she is performing as a live sample bank and processing those samples in real time as they are looped and transformed by the very setup she has defined, Matthews simultaneously surrenders and reclaims her creation, reinstating an authorial presence into the absence around which Cage's 4'33" is based (his "silent" piece in which the ambient sounds of the audience, venue and surrounding space constitute the only sound matter), seeming, like the performer of 4'33" who merely marks off time in three movements, not to be involved in the physical production of sound that François deems necessary for dynamic musical production ("Fixed Timbre" 113), only to reassert her presence in the text as a physical and dynamic entity. Acknowledgement With thanks to Kaffe Matthews and M/C's reviewers and editors. References Deleuze, Gilles. Difference and Repetition. Trans. Paul Patton. London: The Athlone Press, 1994. François, Jean-Charles. "Fixed Timbre, Dynamic Timbre." Perspectives of New Music 28.2 (1990): 112-118. François, Jean-Charles. "Writing without Representation." Perspectives of New Music 30.1 (1992): 6-20. Toop, David. "HIPHOP: Iron Needles of Death and a Piece of Wax." Modulations: A History of Electronic Music: Throbbing Words on Sound. Ed. Peter Shapiro. New York: Caipirinha Productions, 2000: 89-101. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Hainge, Greg. "Platonic Relations" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5.4 (2002). [your date of access] < http://www.media-culture.org.au/mc/0208/platonic.php>. Chicago Style Hainge, Greg, "Platonic Relations" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5, no. 4 (2002), < http://www.media-culture.org.au/mc/0208/platonic.php> ([your date of access]). APA Style Hainge, Greg. (2002) Platonic Relations. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5(4). < http://www.media-culture.org.au/mc/0208/platonic.php> ([your date of access]).

Photograph by Gonzalo Echeverria (2010)The Screen would light up. They would feel a thrill of satisfaction. But the colours had faded with age, the picture wobbled on the screen, the women were of another age; they would come out they would be sad. It was not the film they had dreamt of. It was not the total film each of them had inside himself, the perfect film they could have enjoyed forever and ever. The film they would have liked to make. Or, more secretly, no doubt, the film they would have liked to live. (Perec 57) Over the years that I have watched and thought about Jean-Luc Godard’s films I have been struck by the idea of him as an artist who works with the moving image and perhaps just as importantly the idea of cinema as an irresolvable series of problems. Most obviously this ‘problematic condition’ of Godard’s practice is evidenced in the series of crises and renunciations that pepper the historical trace of his work. A trace that is often characterised thus: criticism, the Nouvelle Vague, May 1968, the Dziga Vertov group, the adoption of video, the return to narrative form, etc. etc. Of all these events it is the rejection of both the dominant cinematic narrative form and its attendant models of production that so clearly indicated the depth and intensity of Godard’s doubt in the artistic viability of the institution of cinema. Historically and ideologically congruent with the events of May 1968, this turning away from tradition was foreshadowed by the closing titles of his 1967 opus Week End: fin de cinema (the end of cinema). Godard’s relentless application to the task of engaging a more discursive and politically informed mode of operation had implications not only for the films that were made in the wake of his disavowal of cinema but also for those that preceded it. In writing this paper it was my initial intention to selectively consider the vast oeuvre of the filmmaker as a type of conceptual project that has in some way been defined by the condition of doubt. While to certain degree I have followed this remit, I have found it necessary to focus on a small number of historically correspondent filmic instances to make my point. The sheer size and complexity of Godard’s output would effectively doom any other approach to deal in generalities. To this end I am interested in the ways that these films have embodied doubt as both an aesthetic and philosophical position. There is an enduring sense of contentiousness that surrounds both the work and perceived motives of the filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard that has never come at the cost of discourse. Through a period of activity that now stretches into its sixth decade Godard has shaped an oeuvre that is as stylistically diverse as it is theoretically challenging. This span of practice is noteworthy not only for its sheer length but for its enduring ability to polarise both audiences and critical opinion. Indeed these opposing critical positions are so well inscribed in our historical understanding of Godard’s practice that they function as a type of secondary narrative. It is a narrative that the artist himself has been more than happy to cultivate and at times even engage. One hardly needs to be reminded that Godard came to making films as a critic. He asserted in the pages of his former employer Cahiers du Cinema in 1962 that “As a critic, I thought of myself as a filmmaker. Today I still think of myself as a critic, and in a sense I am, more than ever before. Instead of writing criticism, I make a film, but the critical dimension is subsumed” (59). If Godard did at this point in time believe that the criticality of practice as a filmmaker was “subsumed”, the ensuing years would see a more overt sense of criticality emerge in his work. By 1968 he was to largely reject both traditional cinematic form and production models in a concerted effort to explore the possibilities of a revolutionary cinema. In the same interview the director went on to extol the virtues of the cine-literacy that to a large part defined the loose alignment of Nouvelle Vague directors (Chabrol, Godard, Rohmer, Rivette, Truffaut) referred to as the Cahiers group claiming that “We were the first directors to know that Griffiths exists” (Godard 60). It is a statement that is as persuasive as it is dramatic, foregrounding the hitherto obscured history of cinema while positioning the group firmly within its master narrative. However, given the benefit of hindsight one realises that perhaps the filmmaker’s motives were not as simple as historical posturing. For Godard what is at stake is not just the history of cinema but cinema itself. When he states that “We were thinking cinema and at a certain moment we felt the need to extend that thought” one is struck by how far and for how long he has continued to think about and through cinema. In spite of the hours of strict ideological orthodoxy that accompanied his most politically informed works of the late 1960s and early 1970s or the sustained sense of wilful obtuseness that permeates his most “difficult” work, there is a sense of commitment to extending “that thought” that is without peer. The name “Godard”, in the words of the late critic Serge Daney, “designates an auteur but it is also synonymous with a tenacious passion for that region of the world of images we call the cinema” (Daney 68). It is a passion that is both the crux of his practice as an artist and the source of a restless experimentation and interrogation of the moving image. For Godard the passion of cinema is one that verges on religiosity. This carries with it all the philosophical and spiritual implications that the term implies. Cinema functions here as a system of signs that at once allows us to make sense of and live in the world. But this is a faith for Godard that is nothing if not tested. From the radical formal experimentation of his first feature film À Bout de soufflé (Breathless) onwards Godard has sought to place the idea of cinema in doubt. In this sense doubt becomes a type of critical engine that at once informs the shape of individual works and animates the constantly shifting positions the artist has occupied. Serge Daney's characterisation of the Nouvelle Vague as possessed of a “lucidity tinged with nostalgia” (70) is especially pertinent in understanding the way in which doubt came to animate Godard’s practice across the 1960s and beyond. Daney’s contention that the movement was both essentially nostalgic and saturated with an acute awareness that the past could not be recreated, casts the cinema itself as type of irresolvable proposition. Across the dazzling arc of films (15 features in 8 years) that Godard produced prior to his renunciation of narrative cinematic form in 1967, one can trace an unravelling of faith. During this period we can consider Godard's work and its increasingly complex engagement with the political as being predicated by the condition of doubt. The idea of the cinema as an industrial and social force increasingly permeates this work. For Godard the cinema becomes a site of questioning and ultimately reinvention. In his 1963 short film Le Grand Escroc (The Great Rogue) a character asserts that “cinema is the most beautiful fraud in the world”. Indeed it is this sense of the paradoxical that shadows much of his work. The binary of beauty and fraud, like that of faith and doubt, calls forth a questioning of the cinema that stands to this day. It is of no small consequence that so many of Godard’s 1960s works contain scenes of people watching films within the confines of a movie theatre. For Godard and his Nouvelle Vague peers the sale de cinema was both the hallowed site of cinematic reception and the terrain of the everyday. It is perhaps not surprising then he chooses the movie theatre as a site to play out some of his most profound engagements with the cinema. Considered in relation to each other these scenes of cinematic viewing trace a narrative in which an undeniable affection for the cinema is undercut by both a sense of loss and doubt. Perhaps the most famous of Godard’s ‘viewing’ scenes is from the film Vivre Sa Vie (My Life to Live). Essentially a tale of existential trauma, the film follows the downward spiral of a young woman Nana (played by Anna Karina) into prostitution and then death at the hands of ruthless pimps. Championed (with qualifications) by Susan Sontag as a “perfect film” (207), it garnered just as many detractors, including famously the director Roberto Rosellini, for what was perceived to be its nihilistic content and overly stylised form. Seeking refuge in a cinema after being cast out from her apartment for non payment of rent the increasingly desperate Nana is shown engrossed in the starkly silent images of Carl Dreyer’s 1928 film La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc (The Passion of Joan of Arc). Godard cuts from the action of his film to quote at length from Dreyer’s classic, returning from the mute intensity of Maria Faloconetti’s portrayal of the condemned Joan of Arc to Karina’s enraptured face. As Falconetti’s tears swell and fall so do Karina’s, the emotional rawness of the performance on the screen mirrored and internalised by the doomed character of Nana. Nana’s identification with that of the screen heroine is at once total and immaculate as her own brutal death at the hands of men is foretold. There is an ominous silence to this sequence that serves not only to foreground the sheer visual intensity of what is being shown but also to separate it from the world outside this purely cinematic space. However, if we are to read this scene as a testament to the power of the cinematic we must also admit to the doubt that resides within it. Godard’s act of separation invites us to consider the scene not only as a meditation on the emotional and existential state of the character of Nana but also on the foreshortened possibilities of the cinema itself. As Godard’s shots mirror those of Dreyer we are presented with a consummate portrait of irrevocable loss. This is a complex system of imagery that places Dreyer’s faith against Godard’s doubt without care for the possibility of resolution. Of all Godard’s 1960s films that feature cinema spectatorship the sequence belonging to Masculin Féminin (Masculine Feminine) from 1966 is perhaps the most confounding and certainly the most digressive. A series of events largely driven by a single character’s inability or unwillingness to surrender to the projected image serve to frustrate, fracture and complexify the cinema-viewing experience. It is however, a viewing experience that articulates the depth of Godard’s doubt in the viability of the cinematic form. The sequence, like much of the film itself, centres on the trials of the character Paul played by Jean-Pierre Léaud. Locked in a struggle against the pop-cultural currents of the day and the attendant culture of consumption and appearances, Paul is positioned within the film as a somewhat conflicted and ultimately doomed romantic. His relationship with Madeleine played by real life yé-yé singer Chantal Goya is a source of constant anxiety. The world that he inhabits, however marginally, of nightclubs, pop records and publicity seems philosophically at odds with the classical music and literature that he avidly devours. If the cinema-viewing scene of Vivre Sa Vie is defined by the enraptured intensity of Anna Karina’s gaze, the corresponding scene in Masculin Féminin stands, at least initially, as the very model of distracted spectatorship. As the film in the theatre starts, Paul who has been squeezed out of his seat next to Madeleine by her jealous girlfriend, declares that he needs to go to the toilet. On entering the bathroom he is confronted by the sight of a pair of men locked in a passionate kiss. It is a strange and disarming turn of events that prompts his hastily composed graffiti response: down with the republic of cowards. For theorist Nicole Brenez the appearance of these male lovers “is practically a fantasmatic image evoked by the amorous situation that Paul is experiencing” (Brenez 174). This quasi-spectral appearance of embracing lovers and grafitti writing is echoed in the following sequence where Paul once again leaves the theatre, this time to fervently inform the largely indifferent theatre projectionist about the correct projection ratio of the film being shown. On his graffiti strewn journey back inside Paul encounters an embracing man and woman nestled in an outer corner of the theatre building. Silent and motionless the presence of this intertwined couple is at once unsettling and prescient providing “a background real for what is being projected inside on the screen” (Brenez 174). On returning to the theatre Paul asks Madeleine to fill him in on what he has missed to which she replies, “It is about a man and woman in a foreign city who…”. Shot in Stockholm to appease the Swedish co-producers that stipulated that part of the production be made in Sweden, the film within a film occupies a fine line between restrained formal artfulness and pornographic violence. What could have been a creatively stifling demand on the part of his financial backers was inverted by Godard to become a complex exploration of power relations played out through an unsettling sexual encounter. When questioned on set by a Swedish television reporter what the film was about the filmmaker curtly replied, “The film has a lot to do with sex and the Swedish are known for that” (Masculin Féminin). The film possesses a barely concealed undertow of violence. A drama of resistance and submission is played out within the confines of a starkly decorated apartment. The apartment itself is a zone in which language ceases to operate or at the least is reduced to its barest components. The man’s imploring grunts are met with the woman’s repeated reply of “no”. What seemingly begins as a homage to the contemporaneous work of Swedish director Ingmar Bergman quickly slides into a chronicle of coercion. As the final scene of seduction/debasement is played out on the screen the camera pulls away to reveal the captivated gazes of Madeleine and her friends. It finally rests on Paul who then shuts his eyes, unable to bear what is being shown on the screen. It is a moment of refusal that marks a turning away not only from this projected image but from cinema itself. A point made all the clearer by Paul’s voiceover that accompanies the scene: We went to the movies often. The screen would light up and we would feel a thrill. But Madeleine and I were usually disappointed. The images were dated and jumpy. Marilyn Monroe had aged badly. We felt sad. It wasn't the movie of our dreams. It wasn't that total film we carried inside ourselves. That film we would have liked to make. Or, more secretly, no doubt the film we wanted to live. (Masculin Féminin) There was a dogged relentlessness to Godard’s interrogation of the cinema through the very space of its display. 1963’s Le Mépris (Contempt) swapped the public movie theatre for the private screening room; a theatrette emblazoned with the words Il cinema é un’invenzione senza avvenire. The phrase, presented in a style that recalled Soviet revolutionary graphics, is an Italian translation of Louis Lumiere’s 1895 appraisal of his new creation: “The cinema is an invention without a future.” The words have an almost physical presence in the space providing a fatalistic backdrop to the ensuing scene of conflict and commerce. As an exercise in self reflexivity it at once serves to remind us that even at its inception the cinema was cast in doubt. In Le Mépris the pleasures of spectatorship are played against the commercial demands of the cinema as industry. Following a screening of rushes for a troubled production of Homer’s Odyssey a tempestuous exchange ensues between a hot-headed producer (Jeremy Prokosch played by Jack Palance) and a calmly philosophical director (Fritz Lang as himself). It is a scene that attests to Godard’s view of the cinema as an art form that is creatively compromised by its own modes of production. In a film that plays the disintegration of a relationship against the production of a movie and that features a cast of Germans, Italians and French it is of no small consequence that the movie producer is played by an American. An American who, when faced with a creative impasse, utters the phrase “when I hear the word culture I bring out my checkbook”. It is one of Godard’s most acerbic and doubt filled sequences pitting as he does the implied genius of Lang against the tantrum throwing demands of the rapacious movie producer. We are presented with a model of industrial relations that is both creatively stifling and practically unworkable. Certainly it was no coincidence that Le Mépris had the biggest budget ($1 million) that Godard has ever worked with. In Godard’s 1965 film Une Femme Mariée (A Married Woman), he would once again use the movie theatre as a location. The film, which dealt with the philosophical implications of an adulterous affair, is also notable for its examination of the Holocaust and that defining event’s relationship to personal and collective memory. Biographer Richard Brody has observed that, “Godard introduced the Auschwitz trial into The Married Woman (sic) as a way of inserting his view of another sort of forgetting that he suggested had taken hold of France—the conjoined failures of historical and personal memory that resulted from the world of mass media and the ideology of gratification” (Brody 196-7). Whatever the causes, there is a pervading sense of amnesia that surrounds the Holocaust in the film. In one exchange the character of Charlotte, the married woman in question, momentarily confuses Auschwitz with thalidomide going on to later exclaim that “the past isn’t fun”. But like the barely repressed memories of her past indiscretions, the Holocaust returns at the most unexpected juncture in the film. In what starts out as Godard’s most overt reference to the work of Alfred Hitchcock, Charlotte and her lover secretly meet under the cover of darkness in a movie theatre. Each arriving separately and kitted out in dark sunglasses, there is breezy energy to this clandestine rendezvous highly reminiscent of the work of the great director. It is a stylistic point that is underscored in the film by the inclusion of a full-frame shot of Hitchcock’s portrait in the theatre’s foyer. However, as the lovers embrace the curtain rises on Alain Resnais’s 1955 documentary Nuit et Brouillard (Night and Fog). The screen is filled with images of barbed wire as the voice of narrator Jean Cayrol informs the audience that “even a vacation village with a fair and a steeple can lead very simply to a concentration camp.” It is an incredibly shocking moment, in which the repressed returns to confirm that while memory “isn’t fun”, it is indeed necessary. An uncanny sense of recognition pervades the scene as the two lovers are faced with the horrendous evidence of a past that refuses to stay subsumed. The scene is all the more powerful for the seemingly casual manner it is relayed. There is no suspenseful unveiling or affected gauging of the viewers’ reactions. What is simply is. In this moment of recognition the Hitchcockian mood of the anticipation of an illicit rendezvous is supplanted by a numbness as swift as it is complete. Needless to say the couple make a swift retreat from the now forever compromised space of the theatre. Indeed this scene is one of the most complex and historically layered of any that Godard had produced up to this point in his career. By making overt reference to Hitchcock he intimates that the cinema itself is deeply implicated in this perceived crisis of memory. What begins as a homage to the work of one of the most valorised influences of the Nouvelle Vague ends as a doubt filled meditation on the shortcomings of a system of representation. The question stands: how do we remember through the cinema? In this regard the scene signposts a line of investigation that would become a defining obsession of Godard’s expansive Histoire(s) du cinéma, a project that was to occupy him throughout the 1990s. Across four chapters and four and half hours Histoire(s) du cinéma examines the inextricable relationship between the history of the twentieth century and the cinema. Comprised almost completely of filmic quotations, images and text, the work employs a video-based visual language that unremittingly layers image upon image to dissolve and realign the past. In the words of theorist Junji Hori “Godard's historiography in Histoire(s) du cinéma is based principally on the concept of montage in his idiosyncratic sense of the term” (336). In identifying montage as the key strategy in Histoire(s) du cinéma Hori implicates the cinema itself as central to both Godard’s process of retelling history and remembering it. However, it is a process of remembering that is essentially compromised. Just as the relationship of the cinema to the Holocaust is bought into question in Une Femme Mariée, so too it becomes a central concern of Histoire(s) du cinéma. It is Godard’s assertion “that the cinema failed to honour its ethical commitment to presenting the unthinkable barbarity of the Nazi extermination camps” (Temple 332). This was a failure that for Godard moved beyond the realm of doubt to represent “nothing less than the end of cinema” (Brody 512). In October 1976 the New Yorker magazine published a profile of Jean Luc Godard by Penelope Gilliatt a writer who shared the post of film critic at the magazine with Pauline Kael. The article was based on an interview that took place at Godard’s production studio in Grenoble Switzerland. It was notable for two things: Namely, the most succinct statement that Godard has made regarding the enduring sense of criticality that pervades his work: “A good film is a matter of questions properly put.” (74) And secondly, surely the shortest sentence ever written about the filmmaker: “Doubt stands.” (77)ReferencesÀ Bout de soufflé. Dir. Jean Luc Godard. 1960. DVD. Criterion, 2007. Brenez, Nicole. “The Forms of the Question.” For Ever Godard. Eds. Michael Temple, James S. Williams, and Michael Witt. London: Black Dog, 2004. Brody, Richard. Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard. New York: Metropolitan Books / Henry Holt & Co., 2008. Daney, Serge. “The Godard Paradox.” For Ever Godard. Eds. Michael Temple, James S. Williams, and Michael Witt. London: Black Dog, 2004. Gilliat, Penelope. “The Urgent Whisper.” Jean-Luc Godard Interviews. Ed. David Sterritt. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1998. Godard, Jean-Luc. “Jean-Luc Godard: 'From Critic to Film-Maker': Godard in Interview (extracts). ('Entretien', Cahiers du Cinema 138, December 1962).” Cahiers du Cinéma: 1960-1968 New Wave, New Cinema, Reevaluating Hollywood. Ed. Jim Hillier. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986. Histoires du Cinema. Dir. and writ. Jean Luc Godard. 1988-98. DVD, Artificial Eye, 2008. Hori, Junji. “Godard’s Two Histiographies.” For Ever Godard. Eds. Michael Temple, James S. Williams, and Michael Witt. London: Black Dog, 2004. Le Grand Escroc. Dir. Jean Luc Godard. Perf. Jean Seberg. Film. Ulysse Productions, 1963. Le Mépris. Dir. Jean Luc Godard. Perf. Jack Palance, Fritz Lang. 1964. DVD. Criterion, 2002. La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc. Dir. Carl Theodor Dreyer. Film. Janus films, 1928. MacCabe, Colin. Godard: A Portrait of the Artist at 70. London: Bloomsbury, 2003. Masculin Féminin. Dir. and writ. Jean Luc Godard. Perf. Jean-Pierre Léaud. 1966. DVD. Criterion, 2005. Nuit et Brouillard. Dir Alain Resnais. Film. Janus Films, 1958. Perec, Georges. Things: A Story of the Sixties. Trans. David Bellos. London: Collins Harvill, 1990. (Originally published 1965.) Sontag, Susan. “Godard’s Vivre Sa Vie.” Against Interpretation and Other Essays. New York: Picador, 2001. Temple, Michael, James S. Williams, and Michael Witt, eds. For Ever Godard. London: Black Dog, 2004. Une Femme Mariée. Dir. and writ. Jean Luc Godard. Perf. Macha Meril. 1964. DVD. Eureka, 2009. Vivre Sa Vie. Dir. and writ. Jean Luc Godard. Perf. Anna Karina. 1962. DVD. Criterion, 2005. Week End, Dir. and writ. Jean Luc Godard. 1967. DVD. Distinction Series, 2005.

Thesis (MTh)--Stellenbosch University, 2011.
ENGLISH ABSTRACT: In reading the letters of Paul to the community in Corinth, it becomes apparent that Paul communicated from a position of authority. Given the existence of the mighty Roman Empire at the time of Paul’s writings, it raises questions regarding the ways such Empire would have affected Paul. This study assesses the possibility that Paul was influenced, not only by the material Roman world, but also by the socio-political and social-cultural dynamics of the Roman order. Paul may have utilised such order, but as spiritual leader, he could also have opposed it to his own ends and aims. The purpose of this study is to investigate such dynamism. The point of departure is, firstly to briefly discuss the nature of the Roman Empire that filled the ancient Roman world with coinage, statues, temples, poetry, song and public rhetoric. The ubiquitous Roman Empire enforced itself through power dynamics constituted in physical force, rhetoric, the patronage system and the Imperial Cult. Patronage operated in tandem with other aspects of the imperial system as a means of social control. It leads, therefore, to a more focussed investigation of patronage as one of the significant dimensions of Empire. Honour, prestige and status disparity governed social relations through complex, reciprocal relationships. No one was immune to the social tug-of-war, and within this context, Paul engaged in his Corinthian correspondence. Paul’s first Corinthian correspondence, specifically 1 Cor 4:14-21, is then comparatively investigated in the light of patronage as dimension of Empire. Paul integrated values such as honour and shame, and used the system of patronage in order to achieve his objectives with the Corinthian community. The socio-rhetorical analysis of this section of Paul’s correspondence investigates socio-cultural, intertextual and ideological aspects of the text. 1 Cor 4:14-21 is the culmination of the first part of Paul’s argument for ὁμόνια (concord), and he empowers his deliberation through patronage. He positions himself uniquely as father of the community, which empowers him with patria potestas (absolute authority). He also describes the way the Corinthians should bestow honour upon themselves. Paul’s use of a challenge-riposte and encomium brings all the weight of his argument to bear, upon his mimetic command to μιμηταί μου γίνεσθε (be imitators of me). The findings of this study indicate that Paul also opposes Empire in various ways. He opposes patronage, when he champions allegiance to an alternative Κύριος (Lord) that represents an alternative kingdom. He acts as a broker between Christ and the community, but the reciprocal relationship consists of shameful behaviour. Paul’s application of patronage does not serve to enhance his social position and poses a significant challenge to the norms of patronage in the Empire. The patent and unresolved tension within his rhetoric stretches between liberal use of patronage, and his opposition of aspects of the imperial order, such as patronage and the abuse of power. This leads to the conclusion that Paul still subjected the attributes of Empire to his own objectives. He had more than a purely political or merely spiritual agenda in mind and ultimately this remains the power and mystery of his argument.
AFRIKAANSE OPSOMMING: By die lees van die sendbriewe van Paulus aan die jong Christelike gemeente in Korinte val dit op dat Paulus, hoewel in herderlike trant, vanuit ’n gesagsposisie tot die gemeente spreek. Gesien die tyd waarin Paulus geleef het, ’n tydperk van die bestaan van die magtige Romeinse Ryk, rys die vraag onwillekeurig of Paulus as geestelike leier van opkomende gemeentes nie enigermate deur die heersende Romeinse maatskaplike orde beïnvloed is nie. In die onderhawige studie word die moontlikheid van nader betrag dat die sosiaal-politieke en sosiaalkulturele aspekte van die Romeinse bestel Paulus wel kon beïnvloed het. Die wyse waarop Paulus sodanige orde sou kon aanwend of moontlik teëstaan word ondersoek. Die vertrekpunt is dus om allereers die aard van die Romeinse Ryk - gekenmerk deur ‘n eie muntstelsel, tallose standbeelde, tempels, digkuns, sang en openbare retoriek - in hooftrekke uiteen te sit. Die uitgebreide Ryk het sy mag gevestig en gehandhaaf deur middel van kragdadigheid, retoriek, weldoenerskap en die Keiserkultus. Ter verdieping van die ondersoek word weldoenerskap as onderdeel van die Romeinse sosiaalpolitieke orde in fyner besonderhede beskou. Daaruit blyk dat beskermheerskap ter ondersteuning gedien het ten einde doeltreffender maatskaplike beheer uit te oefen. ‘n Verfynde wisselwerking het - deur middel van die dinamiek van eer, aansien en mag - sosiale verhoudings en gedrag beheer: niemand was teen die woelinge van die sosiale stryd gevrywaar nie. Dit was teen hierdie agtergrond van die werklikheid van die magtige Romeinse imperium dat Paulus met die Korintiërs gekorrespondeer het. Paulus word daarna vergelykenderwys ondersoek aan die hand van die gedeelte uit sy brief aan die Korintiërs soos gevind in 1 Kor 4:14-21. Daarin beroep hy hom op waardes soos eer en skaamte, terwyl hy die stelsel van weldoenerskap aanwend ten einde sy oogmerke met die gemeente te bereik. Die sosio-retoriese analise van hierdie gedeelte van Paulus se sendbrief ondersoek sosiaal-kulturele, intertekstuele en ideologiese aspekte van die brief. 1 Kor 4:14-21 is die hoogtepunt van die eerste gedeelte van Paulus se betoog vir ὁμόνια (eenheid) en hy versterk sy argument deur middel van weldoenerskap. Op uitsonderlike wyse posisioneer hy hom as vader van die gemeente: in sy betoog beklee hy hom met patria potestas (absolute gesag). Paulus se gebruik van ‘n challenge-riposte en van ‘n inkomium verleen groter seggenskrag aan sy direktief om hom na te volg; μιμηταί μου γίνεσθε (volg my na). Die uitkoms van hierdie studie is dat Paulus die imperiale orde ook op verskeie wyses sterk teëstaan. Wat Paulus verkondig het te make met ‘n alternatiewe Κύριος (Heer) en ‘n gans andersoortige koninkryk. Hy tree op as ‘n bemiddelaar (broker) tussen Christus en die gemeenskap, maar poog nie om sosiale bevordering te bewerkstellig, soos bepaal deur die norme van die imperial orde nie. Daar is dus ‘n aanwesige spanning in Paulus se retoriek wat dui daarop dat Paulus dimensies van die Ryk, soos weldoenerskap, ondergeskik gestel het aan sy eie doelwitte. Die slotsom waartoe geraak word, is dat by Paulus meer as suiwer politieke motivering enersyds, of bloot geestelike motivering andersyds, aanwesig was. Hierin is sowel die krag as die misterie van sy betoog geleë.

by Ho Lai Han.
Thesis (M.Div.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 1993.
Includes bibliographical references (leaves 82-85).
ABSTRACT --- p.iii
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS --- p.iv
ABBREVIATIONS --- p.v
Chapter
Chapter I. --- INTRODUCTION --- p.1
Chapter II. --- EGALITARIAN PAULINE PASSAGES --- p.6
Chapter A. --- In General (Gal 3:28) --- p.6
Chapter 1. --- Equality through Baptism --- p.8
Chapter 2. --- Casting off Gnostic Influence --- p.8
Chapter a. --- Traces of Alteration --- p.8
Chapter b. --- The Myth of Androgyne --- p.10
Chapter 3. --- Assertion of Sexual Equality --- p.14
Chapter 4. --- Social-ecclesial Implication --- p.17
Chapter B. --- In Social-ecclesial Contexts --- p.21
Chapter 1. --- In Marriage (1 Cor 7:1-7) --- p.21
Chapter a. --- Sexual Abstinence in Marriage --- p.21
Chapter b. --- Mutual and Equal Rights --- p.24
Chapter 2. --- In Worship (1 Cor 11:3-16) --- p.25
Chapter a. --- Insistence on Proper Head Attire --- p.27
Chapter i. --- Jewish Argument --- p.27
Chapter a) --- "Meaning of k∈φαλn (""head"")"
Chapter b) --- "Implication of k∈φαλn (""head"")"
Chapter ii. --- Stoic Arguments --- p.31
Chapter iii. --- Argument of Church Practice --- p.32
Chapter b. --- Meaning of Proper Head Attire --- p.33
Chapter i. --- Proposal of Bound Hair --- p.33
Chapter ii. --- Proposal of Veil --- p.34
Chapter iii. --- Conclusion about Meaning of Proper Head Attire --- p.36
Chapter c. --- Prevalence of Pagan Cults --- p.39
Chapter d. --- Assertion of Sexual Equality --- p.41
Chapter i. --- Repudiating Connotation of Woman's Subordination --- p.41
Chapter ii. --- Correcting Jewish Thought of Woman's Subordination --- p.42
Chapter C. --- Concluding Remarks --- p.44
Chapter III. --- MALE CHAUVINIST DEUTERO-PAULINE PASSAGES --- p.45
Chapter A. --- In General (1 Tim 2:11-15) --- p.45
Chapter B. --- In Social-ecclesial Contexts --- p.48
Chapter 1. --- In Marriage --- p.48
Chapter a. --- Col 3:18 --- p.48
Chapter b. --- Eph 5:22-33 --- p.49
Chapter c. --- Tit 2:4-5 --- p.51
Chapter 2. --- In Worship --- p.52
Chapter a. --- """1 Cor 14:33b-35""" --- p.53
Chapter b. --- 1 Tim 2:8-10 --- p.56
Chapter C. --- Concluding Remarks --- p.56
Chapter IV. --- FACTORS LEADING TO REGRESSIVE DEVELOPMENT OF WOMAN'S STATUS --- p.58
Chapter A. --- Insufficient Consolidation in Pauline Churches --- p.60
Chapter 1. --- Situational Nature of Pauline Passages --- p.60
Chapter 2. --- Prominence of Women Leaders Reflected in Pauline Epistles --- p.61
Chapter B. --- Conformity to Sitz im Leben in Deutero-Pauline Churches --- p.64
Chapter 1. --- Conformity in Form --- p.65
Chapter 2. --- Conformity in Content --- p.66
Chapter C. --- Concluding Remarks --- p.68
Chapter V. --- CONTEXTUAL REFLECTION --- p.70
Chapter A. --- Christian Authority --- p.71
Chapter 1. --- Literal Interpretation of Bible --- p.71
Chapter 2. --- Abuses in the Church --- p.72
Chapter B. --- Sustaining Convictions --- p.75
Chapter C. --- To Christianize or Be Paganized? --- p.76
Chapter VI. --- CONCLUSION --- p.78
BIBLIOGRAPHY --- p.82

D.Phil. et Litt.
The interaction between law and love in Pauline writing has been an interesting topic, where we have discovered that the law of God cannot be separated from his agape love, which has followed mankind from creation and eventually leads him to eternity. We discovered that the law of God reveals God's character and that is his love. The Law of God and His Love are one and cannot be separated from each other. God gives the law to prove to man that he loves him deeply and eternally. When Jesus Christ died on the cross of Calvary, He died because of the love for his created beings and the law that was broken and could not be altered or changed without the shedding of blood. The redemption of the sinner had to be made possible through the shedding of blood by the one who had not broken God's law. The love and death of Jesus can only be understood through the plan of salvation, which is the interaction between law and love as exposed in Pauline writings. This is a mystery of the wonderful love of our Lord Jesus Christ. It is wonderful to discover the way Paul blends the law and love in a way that it makes it hard to separate the two. If not carefully studied, one would not be able to see this fact in Pauline writings. The Law of God is actually the expression of His love to us. He would like. us to love Him by keeping the first four commandments and loving our fellow man by keeping the last six of the Ten Commandments. We need to have a positive outlook on the law, so that we may love to do God's will and honour Him because He loved us dearly and did not spare His own son for our redemption. The plan of redemption was born out of the eternal love of God towards humanity that could not be measured by anything on earth and in Heaven. In chapter one and two, we look at the overview of law and love in Pauline writings. The Pauline framework, its theology and the ethics of law and love. The whole plan of salvation for all humanity and how God loves all His creation. Although God had a chosen people through Abraham, He only wanted to make His love known throughout the world and all generations. God had always had His special people through whom He made His love and care known although they sometimes failed to is do His will. Like the children of Israel failed him throughout the ages and He has always been patient with them until they killed Jesus on the Cross.

The Concept of the Pauline church unity founded on baptism is investigated from a practical theological perspective in terms of both the theoretical and practical method. After outlining the theological principles of this analogy; an actual situation of a local church is researched and the findings of this empirical analysis are used to indicate terms of a practical model of the body of Christ. An essential theological principle is that the church is to serve the Kingdom of God and to be a continuing incarnation of the word of God. The church which is full of quarrels and divisions would not be able to proclaim the word of God freely. Instead of preaching the word of God; they will concentrate on calling themselves that; I am of Paul, and I of Apollos; and I of Cephas; and I of Christ. This type of expression does not build unity among Christians. What we must do as Christians is that we should accept one another regardless of being affiliated to ZCC; Roman catholic church, Apostolic Faith Mission; Nazarene church, etc. According to Paul's views, all churches from different denominations form the body of Christ. There are also a handful of local churches whose members are trying to increase diversity within their pews. My aspiration is to see all the Christians from different races coming together; praying together and worshipping together as the children of God. My wish is to see the leaders from various denomination focusing on promoting fellowship and reconciliation amongst themselves and their church members accepting one another. The resolute determination of some whites to travel to black communities to worship or of blacks to join and participate in overwhelming white congregations; reveals the depth of some Christians desire to overcome the barriers which have been part of South African life for so long. This desire may be for more prevalent among the laity than the clergy have traditionally imagined. Christians from different races must change if they want to enter into the Kingdom of God. The disturbing factor is that without a real willingness to change there is little hope that it will be achieved in a generation still cluttered with the baggage of the past. Reconciliation and dignity of all believers in Christ needs to be encouraged by Pastors and church members, because we all from the body of Christ.
Religious Studies & Arabic
M.A. (Biblical Studies)

Chapter 1 introduces the need for an updated study on the inheritance in the Pauline epistles, examines the history of research on this topic, and states the thesis of this dissertation. Then it explains the method that will be employed to examine the relevant inheritance texts and provides an overview of the dissertation. Chapter 2 argues that typology and intertextuality are significant for interpreting the inheritance in Paul. Thus it explains these hermeneutical concepts before moving on to an analysis of the pertinent texts. Chapter 3 contends that in Genesis to Chronicles the central understanding of the inheritance is the land of Canaan promised to Abraham and his descendants (e.g.Gen 15:3-5, 17:8; 21:10), the territory to which Israel sojourned and established a kingdom. Subsequently, chapter 4 displays that the Psalms and Prophets expand the inheritance to include the eschatological world (e.g., Ps 2; Isa 54, 65-66). When God's people enter their inheritance, David's royal descendent will reign over them forever (Ezek 36-37; cf. Dan 7). Chapter 5 demonstrates that the Second Temple literature, in line with the Psalms and Prophets, expands the inheritance to include the whole world (e.g., Sir 44:21; Jub. 22:14, 32:19). This is the place to which God's people will be resurrected to dwell (e.g., 4 Ezra 7) and over which Messiah will reign (e.g., 1 En. 51:1-5; 1QHª 14:29-31). Chapter 6 argues that Paul's interpretation of the inheritance in Galatians follows that of the Old Testament and Second Temple literature, for he views this theme to be the renewed world (3:15-29; 4:21-31) where God will establish his lasting monarchy (4:1-7). Paul also suggests that the Spirit will see to it that believers receive their future inheritance (4:1-7). Chapter 7 then examines the pertinent passages in Romans and other Pauline texts, confirming the observations about the inheritance in Galatians. Chapter 8 summarizes the findings of each chapter and affirms the thesis of this dissertation.

D.Litt. et Phil.
Throughout the history of the Church, there has been an aversion to mysticism. Much of it is because of a basic misunderstanding of the concept, and because of the contradiction that mysticism has historicaly proved to be for the Church. As someone has said: "It has been the well spring of both saints and schismatics, the hallmark of luminaries and lunatics alike. It has been a force for the active upbuilding of the Body of Christ and an impetus to the counter-currents of sectarianism, anti-nomianism and quietism. It has issued in theologies of impeccable trinitarian montheism and in the heterodoxy of pantheism". We have looked at the word "mysticism" and derived the basic definition: Being in communion with the divine reality (see chp.1, pg.41). For most, it involves a process; one cannot encounter the divinity, but by going through a specified process. We have discovered that "mysticism" is practiced by non-christian religions too. These include Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism and other eastern religions. The process often includes ascetic tendencies, meditation, contemplative methods and transcendental communications. The general quest is for inner peace, tranquility, knowledge and light, and ultimately, to bring some self-realization, which is really a loss of self in the Absolute. In our understanding, christian-mysticism is different. It is having a personal relationship with God through his Son, Jesus Christ, and to be in fellowship with him through his indwelling Spirit. We speak of communion with a trinitarian God; not by processes of asceticism, meditation, contemplation and transcendental communications ascending to God, but by faith in a God who descended to meet us in the God-man, Jesus Christ. We believe therefore that every believer and only believers in Jesus Christ, are true "mystics". The word "mysticism" is unfortunate, because of all the negative understanding, and because it is applied to experience outside Christ as well. It might be better to change it to another name; but what?; we don't know. Participation, fellowship, communion, etc., are inadequate because they do not necessarily mean that it is with God, whereas "mysticism" includes all these ideas uniquely in relation to God. Having stated its inadequaces, we have nevertheless employed the word "participation" alongside " myticism " .

ABSTRACT THE ECCLESIOLOGICAL GROUNDING OF PAULINE LANGUAGE OF LEADERSHIP IN 1 AND 2 TIMOTHY Robert Lee Stanford, Ph.D. The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2015 Chair: Dr. Hal K. Pettegrew The purpose of this textually-based research was to establish the thesis that there is a discernible language of leadership utilized by the apostle Paul in 1 and 2 Timothy, born out of his ecclesiological purposes. This thesis investigated Paul’s leadership from the perspective of his leader-speak. A working premise was that leaders lead through communication of concepts and ideas, with the goal of influencing and persuading followers. To that end, leadership was defined as the effort to influence others to accomplish a collective goal through the development of relationships, actions, and words, which stimulate the attendant actions of those being led, in order to effect the desired response of a shared achievement. Similarly Paul’s leader-speak was defined, in part, as that which was communicated, to some degree, through the rhetorical teaching of his day and empowered and utilized by the holy spirit. The thesis measured against the discoveries offered a biblical base, 1 Timothy 3:15, for the theological context and purpose that informs Paul’s language of leadership. Paul’s ecclesiological purpose is that the church, the pillar and support of truth, must protect and promote the gospel. To that end, Paul’s leader-speak is concerned about orthodoxy as well as orthopraxy. Such leader-speak issues from Paul’s mouth to Timothy in a variety of voices including that of a father, teacher, and example. A parental perspective is apparent in the conversational framing and vocabulary Paul utilizes, as well as the tenor of his words. Paul speaks as a teacher in the employment of metaphorical illustrations, preformed materials and rhetorical strategies. Paul’s leader-speak is often the rhetoric of example: godly behavior in suffering. Such implicit language of example is often that of influence and persuasion, as well as contrast. At other times, Paul is explicitly direct in his leader-speak. The thesis of a Pauline language of leadership grounded in an ecclesiological purpose appears to be a valuable proposition. Thus, some implications and applications of these conclusions were discussed.