OpenUCT :: Browsing by Author "Higgins, John"

Browsing by Author "Higgins, John"

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A soft man in hard times: Lionel Abrahams: writing the state of emergency
(2022) Smith, Robert Alex; Higgins, John
This thesis has the principle aim of providing a critical reading of the work of Lionel Abrahams, intending to provide the first serious scholarly interpretation of his thought. The argument that it purses is that what is at stake in his work is a thinking through the state of emergency. The state of emergency, however, is not approached as the formal legal periods in South African history under apartheid. Instead, following the insights of the Italian Philosopher Giorgio Agamben, it treats the legal state of emergency as the singular apparatus of the governing metaphysical paradigm that underpins modernity and its colonial instantiations. It adopts Agamben's notion of the ban as the paradigm for this metaphysic, using this as an entry point to understand Abrahams' participation in the debates of literature and the status of art in South Africa under apartheid. Throughout this study, the status of art is extended as an allegory for the status of life more generally. The movement is always the same: something is divided, with one element being excluded as illegitimate, and precisely through this exclusion is included in the other as its foundation. In sphere of art, the separation is between prose and poetry, commitment and autonomy, black and white art, with each working as the negative foundation of the latter. This too holds for notions of citizenship, where a line of distinction is drawn between the Bantu and the European, with the former's exclusion from the metropole serving as the foundation of the rights of the latter. So too for humanity, which is split into the distinct races, each of whose identity is the negation and the distorted image of the other. Having established the ban as the operative structure that defines the state of emergency, the study then turns to Abrahams first novel, The Celibacy of Felix Greenspan (1976), as well as several collections of poetry with a specific task: interrogating strategies of its overcoming. By taking the ban as being primarily a structure of relation (between language and things, the subject and the other, as well as the subject's relation to their own capacity for action), the study concludes with an examination of two principle and interrelated themes in Abrahams' work: community and the literary act; or, put differently, what is the principle that founds and sustains both literature and community? Through a close reading of his fictional and poetic work, this thesis will argue that it is Agamben's notion of inoperativity, which is elaborated on most notably in the essay “What Is the Act of Creation?”, which resides at the heart of and is the key to understanding Abrahams' thought.
Open Access
Abjection in the novels of Marlene Van Niekerk
(2013) Crous, Matthys Lourens; Higgins, John
In this thesis, three of Marlene van Niekerk's novels, translated from Afrikaans into English, are examined, with the focus on the representation of abjection in the texts under discussion.The theoretical point of departure of this study is Julia Kristeva's essay Powers of horror (1982), which addresses, in particular, the notion of abjection and how certain abject elements play a pivotal role in people's everyday lives. From a psychoanalytic perspective, abjection is viewed as a revolt against the mother and foregrounds particularly the influence of the maternal body over the subject. In this instance, the subject desires liberation from the hold of the maternal and seeks to subject the mother to abjection. Bodily fluids seeping out of the body, diseases, viruses, dirt and death (and in particular the corpse) are all elements that are encompassed in the concept of abjection. Manifestations of abjection in the form of the abject mother, abject spaces, abject bodies and the link between abjection and filth are comparatively analysed in the three texts. The thesis concludes by showing that Van Niekerk deliberately inscribes elements of the abject into her texts so as to transgress and deconstruct the norms associated with a patriarchal and racist society in South Africa. Van Niekerk also undermines the norms that underpin such a society: religious indoctrination, gender oppression and Othering. By writing her novel Triomf (1999) in a demotic register, Van Niekerk furthermore questions the prevalent assumptions about what is deemed proper language for writing a novel. Writing, for her, thus serves the purposes of abjecting, of rejecting the impositions of the symbolic order. Following the publication of her first collection of short stories, Die Vrou wat haar verkyker vergeet het [The woman who forgot her binoculars] in 1992, there was general consensus that the baroque nature of the language resulted in reader resistance to the text. This explains why she decided to write her first novel in the crude and obscene language of a low-class family, the Benades of Triomf.
Open Access
Between life and death : HIV and AIDS and representation in South Africa
(2007) Thomas, Kylie; Higgins, John
This dissertation examines the relation between political and semiotic representation and takes as its focus the marginalized social position of people living with HIV and AIDS in South Africa. It argues that this position can best be understood as a space between life and death. It engages with Michel Foucault's concept of "bio-power" to interrogate what kinds of subjects are produced when power seizes hold of life and, in particular, what becomes of subjectivity when the body is abandoned by power; and also draws on the work of cultural theorists Giorgio Agamben and Judith Butler to consider how conditions of life in South Africa in the time of HIV and AIDS both articulate with and exceed the bio-political. The dissertation first presents a brief account of the history of the epidemic and government responses to it, and then goes on to analyse a series of visual and textual representations of people living with HIV and AIDS in Southern Africa.
Open Access
Beyond reason: revising the place of literature in theories of the uncanny
(2016) Anderson, Wesley; Higgins, John
The psychoanalytic fixation in seeking to validate 'the real' has long overlooked various key components in theories of the uncanny as they relate to literature. The goal of the present study is to reaffirm the roles of uncertainty, ambiguity, and the purposeful lack of closure in the experience of the uncanny, features which will come to form an integral part of a new theory.
Open Access
The cutting edge : deviant realisms and cinematic disruption
(2007) Watson, Mary; Higgins, John
This thesi explores two possibilities and relates them to each other: infusions of fantasy (or magic, the dream, the ,marvellous) which undermine realism and the use of disruption as a specific strategy for communicating disorder or elusive experience. It examines the expression of both fantasy and disruption with an emphasis on film editing. This study considers editing as the foundation of narrative structure in film, and explores the effects of alternative articulations of space, time and the body in film that deliberately subvert the norms of continuity editing.
Open Access
From chef to superstar : food media from World War 2 to the World Wide Web
(2007) Hansen, Signe; Higgins, John
This thesis examines representations of food in twenty-first century media, and argues that the media obsession with food in evidence today follows directly from U.K. and U.S. post-war industrial and economic booms, and by the associated processes of globalisation that secure the spread of emergent trends from these countries to the rest of the so-called Western world. The theoretical frame for the work is guided in large part by Guy Debord's Society of the Spectacle (1967), which follows a Marxist tradition of examining the intersection between consumerism and social relationships. Debord's spectacle is not merely something to be looked at, but functions, like Marx's fetishised commodity, as a mechanism of alienation. The spectacle does this by substituting real, lived experience with representations of life. Based on analyses of media representations of food from the post-war period to the present day, the work argues against the discursive celebration of globalisation as a signifier of abundance and access, and maintains, instead, that consequent to the now commonplace availability of choice and information is a deeply ambiguous relationship to food because it is a relationship overwhelmingly determined by media rather than experience. It further argues that the success of food media results from a spectacular conflation of an economy of consumerism with the basic human need to consume to survive. Contemporary celebrity chefs emerge as the locus of this conflation by representing figures of authority on that basic need, and also, through branded products (including themselves), the superfluity of consumerism. The subject of the work, therefore, is food, but the main object of its critique is media. Food media from World War 2 to the World Wide Web is about the commodification of history and politics, through food, and the natural (super)star of this narrative is the modern celebrity chef.
Open Access
A gaze of one's own : feminist film theory, with application to Klute
(1994) Hicks, Pamela Jane; Higgins, John
This study is concerned with the development of a field of film theory around the place of the female spectator. Chapter 1 presents an historical overview of some trends in the development of film theory, with emphasis on the emergence of a paradigm in which theories of semiotics, ideology and psychoanalysis intersect. It critically assesses the establishment of a dominant theory founded in the notion of film as art, proposing certain parallels between this and contemporary Leavisite literary theory, and notes auteurism as the point of departure from this into the consideration of film as popular culture. It then traces the impact of the critiques by Barthes and Foucault of authorial intentionality, Althusser's theory of ideology and Lacanian psychoanalytic theory in the shift to a body of film theory centrally concerned with the notion of film as text. The feminist intervention is located at the meeting point of this theory with the concerns of the emergent women's movement, and is traced in its development from the "image of" criticism of Rosen and Haskell to Claire Johnston's and Laura Mulvey's seminal work on women and representation. Chapter 2 focuses on some of the theoretical considerations of the image and the gaze, extends these into the theory of cinema as an apparatus, and outlines feminist critiques of apparatus theory. Accounts of representation and the image are drawn from Bill Nichols, John Berger, and Peter Wollen's summary of C.S. Peirce. In the shift of theoretical interest to the process of viewing film, Munsterberg's account of the psychology of vision is noted. The psychoanalytic construction of visual meaning is traced through Lacan's elaboration of the mirror phase to its significance for cinema in the centrality of desire and the gaze. The consequent development of a model of cinema as an apparatus by Baudry and Metz is followed. The feminist criticism of the androcentricity of this model is traced, both through its outright rejection, and through specific critiques by Teresa de Lauretis, Jacqueline Rose, Kaja Silverman, Mary Ann Doane and Constance Penley. Chapter 3 follows three theorists in their attempts to account for female spectatorship: Laura Mulvey's theory of oscillation, Teresa de Lauretis's double identification and Mary Ann Doane's accounts both of textual strategies of specularization in the "woman's film" and the masquerade are considered. Chapter 4 presents an analysis of the text Klute in order to apply some of the theoretical implications, particularly around questions of female subjectivity and spectatorship. It situates Klute within its historical context, in relation to the cinema industry and the emergent women's movement, and within the terms suggested by its generic structuration. The Conclusion provides a summary of my intention to provide an overview of this difficult and fertile field of debate. An Appendix provides a script of Klute.
Open Access
George Orwell and Raymond Williams : a comparison of their thoughts on politics, letters and language
(1989) Johnson, D W; Bertelsen, Eve; Higgins, John
The purpose of this study is to explore the relationship between George Orwell and Raymond Williams as reflected in their respective writings on politics, letters and language. The study aims to provide a close historical reading of exemplary texts written by Orwell and Williams. This involves: description of the historical context in which the texts were produced; close analysis of the selected texts; and summarising their related writings in these three areas in order to place the 'exemplary texts' in the context of their work as a whole. Finally, having thus provided a synthesis of their respective thoughts on politics, letters and language, the similarities and differences between Orwell and Williams are derived. The conclusion drawn in this study is that notwithstanding several important differences, Orwell and Williams share a number of fundamental assumptions and beliefs in these defined areas. In their 'political' writings, they share a reliance on the evidence of experience; a sense of Britain as a society governed ultimately by consensus rather than by conflict; and a commitment to similar forms of socialist-humanism. In their work on letters, they both resist the dominant definitions of 'literature'; they both explore the relation between 'politics' and 'letters'; and they both seek to use 'letters' in the service of (socialist) 'politics'. In their understandings of language, both Orwell and Williams assume a 'unified subject' that precedes language as the source of meaning; they both insist on the existence of some pre-linguistic 'reality'; and they share a sense of language as being in some way constitutive. The differences between Orwell and Williams can be summarised as follows: first, they wrote in different contexts; second, they represent different constituences of British socialism (Orwell middle-class and Williams working-class}; and third, whereas Orwell is a popular essayist, Williams is a literary academic, who explores the many concerns they share with greater subtlety and care.
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Ideas of Wallace Stevens : Fredric Jameson's view of the poet
(2011) Engels, Ryland; Higgins, John
This dissertation focuses upon Fredric Jameson's essay 'Exoticism and Structuralism in Wallace Stevens', which concerns the American poet's writings and their relevance to contemporary culture. ... This paper ultimately supports Fredric Jameson's assertion that Stevens cultivated a style that favours impersonality and abstract universality over the Romantic individualism that is typical of Modernist poetry in English.
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Idylls, Imitation, Ideology and Imperialism: A Fanonian Critique of National Liberation
(2021) Moodley, Seshadari Jesse; Higgins, John
Decolonisation flooded through Africa after WW2, spearheaded by national liberation movements, apparently. In most cases, this did not lead to national sovereignty or independence, and did not alleviate poverty. Decolonisation eventually led to inequality, economic stagnation, and new, subtle forms of outside control. Fanon's incomplete work shows contradictions in national liberation (and the parties which represent it). Using Fanon's work, I criticise nationalism, the expected role of the national bourgeoisie, racism and consumerism, and reified conceptions of politics, democracy, corruption and socialism. Each of these reified conceptions, common to decolonial movements, is presented by the national liberation movements as the overcoming of problems of Western modernity. In fact, I show that these conceptions are all new forms of the problems they claim to overcome. I supplement Fanon's work with ideas and arguments from Marxism and psychoanalysis, as well as many interesting examples from decolonisation. These show how Fanon's predictions were frequently correct, though he lived to see few of them. I use Fanon's writing to show some of the ideologies underlying the worldview of national liberation. Those ideological motifs that are continually present include Freudian illusion, reification (I show how countries, leaders, people etc. are erroneously represented as independent of each other), false identification (particularly the representation of a whole thing by its parts or its symbols, including operationalism), interpellation of individuals as subjects, and images and symbols that manipulate the unconscious. These lead to false interpretations of decolonisation, and individuals celebrating their own domination. Fanon understands decolonisation as not an end to colonisation but a continuation of imperialism; we will read it thus, not as a break from the past but a continuation of its problems.
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The informe in David Lynch's cinema : reading American film through the 'Philosophy' of Georges Bataille
(2005) Macdonald, Robert; Higgins, John; Stadler, Jane
This dissertation argues that several of American film-maker David Lynch's works employ a subversive textual operation in their representations of America and American life that is comparable, in both its approach and political signiﬁcance, to the collapse of conceptual systems French philosopher Georges Bataille termed 'informe'. Each chapter of this thesis explores an aspect of American ideology that has been shaped within filmic conventions of genre, narration and representation, analysing how the informe in Lynch's films encourages awareness of difference; of other possibilities for representing human relations beyond these powerful circumscriptions of identity and ideology. In each analysis, the 'work' of the informe in the ﬁlms under discussion is also linked to some of the prominent political concerns dealt with in Bataille's work. These include his focus on genuine human connectedness, eroticism and transgression, all of which are couched within a broader philosophical emphasis that emerges in his work on the need for balance in social existence between the 'heterogeneous' or 'sacred' aspects of society on the one hand, and the 'homogeneous' or 'profane' on the other.
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K. Sello Duiker's realism: form, critique, and floating kingdoms
(2017) Rourke, Warren Jeremy; Higgins, John
Before drawing together composite elements from his works of novelistic art, as well as his life in writing, the intention of this thesis is to argue that Duiker's realism is an 'authentic' one. Furthermore, Duiker's 'commitment' as an authentic literary realist is to 'articulate' an oppositional world outlook that I am codifying as 'alter-native'. The alter-nativism is expressed not only by the 'interplay' of the 'lumpen' protagonists of the novels but by Duiker himself in the extra-generic marginalia to his short literary career. In order to give 'value' to the contention of this thesis as a whole I will utilize a number of theorists working critically with the relation between language and consciousness, and therefore, as I argue, the 'zero point' of social being.
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Manifestations of humanism in Cuban history, politics, and culture
(2007) Kronenberg, Clive; Higgins, John
The thesis explores what it deems are some of the most perceptible humanistic features in Cuban history, politics, and culture, less specified, or highlighted, or generally not presented in a cohesive body of knowledge in the western scholarly world. In the context of its subject, the thesis embraces rational-critical thinking and supports the custom of non-violent dispute. Insofar as the Cuban Constitution incorporates a range of goals structured on socialist principles, the thesis sets out to scrutinise manifestations in Cuban thinking emblematic of the Marxist-humanist and/or anti-Stalinist philosophical traditions of revolutionary praxis. The thesis' main body investigates, illustrates, and analyses the presence of such features, focussing predominantly on the period 1959 to the late 1960s. Where the thesis does delve into timeframes beyond this era, it endeavours to show the continuity of relevant facets previously identified. Preceding the main examination, the thesis looks into what is widely perceived as the main roots of the country's humanist tradition, the moral ideas and standpoints of Jose Marti, the country's national hero. A further objective of this thesis lies in the belief that aspects of Cuba's national cultural policy in large measure addresses historical issues post-Apartheid South Africa confronts today.
Open Access
The nature industry : reflections on culture at the end of nature
(2004) Green, Louise; Higgins, John
At the end of the twentieth and the beginning of the twenty-first century the concept of nature assumes a new visibility. I argue that this visibility, which takes the form of an anxiety about 'the end of nature', can be linked to a sense of crisis surrounding the possibility of life in late capitalist society. An understanding of the 'end of nature', I suggest, can best be achieved by returning to the work of Theodor Adorno. In particular, the figure of the constellation seems to offer a effective mode of analysis for addressing the complexities contained in this cultural phenomenon. The cultural texts I have chosen to juxtapose are drawn from a series of seemingly unconnected areas of cultural life: a parkway, a utopian novel, an exhibition of chimpanzee paintings, a dystopian novel, a series of popular films and a number of philosophical essays and cultural commentaries. I say seemingly unconnected because my thesis attempts to show how the general sense of 'the end of nature' emerges in different ways in these different discursive forms and representational arenas. What emerges from this constellation of elements is an image of nature as that which holds and conceals the irreducible contradictions of living in consumer society. The image makes visible how things like landscapes, animals and human bodies, become marginalized and/or reduced to commodities sometimes even in the very act of trying to conserve them. What also becomes evident in the phenomenon of the end of nature is an inflation in the value of the concept of 'nature'. If in some ways, the new value acquired by nature seems simply to repeat an earlier movement, in which reified nature becomes the desired alternative to the degraded landscape of industrial production, this interpretation does not sufficiently account for the extent and intensity of recent interest in nature. This inflation in the value of nature is not only a tum away from history. It also involves recognizing something about the agency of what is not human. Nature returns as a sign of loss and of value not only because of real environmental concerns, but also because, in a lived condition of increasing abstraction, it contains the promise of something outside.
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Oblique figures : representations of Islam in South African media and culture
(2004) Baderoon, Gabeba; Higgins, John; Erasmus, Zimitri; Steadman-Jones, Richard
In 1996 stories in South African newspapers about the group Pagad articulated a new vision of Islam. In this thesis I conduct a long reading of the ways in which Islam has been represented in South Africa to provide a context for analysing the Pagad stories. Drawing on Edward Said's Orientalism and later elaborations that emphasise gender, the thesis is attentive to the latent weight of fantasies of 'race' on non-fictional representations. In the introduction I look at the use of the offensive word 'kaffir' in colonial South Africa and contend that, in the context of slavery and the displacement of indigenous people, the proliferating use of the term functioned to recast indigeneity as misplaced and unfit, facilitating settler claims to the land. Through the example of this deformation of a word originally drawn from Islam, I show how the meanings and experiences of Islam are transformed by specific circumstances and histories. Islam arrived in South Africa when Dutch colonists brought slaves and servants to the Cape from 1658. The context of slavery and colonial settlement is crucial to the way Islam has been represented in South Africa. Muslim slaves were characterized as industrious, placid and picturesque. I contend in analyses of nineteenth century landscape paintings that the figure of the 'Malay' played a role in discursively securing a settler identity in the Cape Colony. This occurred through their 'oblique' positioning near the edge of the frame, where they appear to certify the boundaries of the settled space of the colony. I follow these readings of the picturesque vision of Islam by exploring instances of its underside - the discourse of oriental fanaticism.
Open Access
On Rearing an Ugly Head: Joel-Peter Witkin and the Mysticism of the “Ugly Aesthetic”
(2020) Ballen, Amanda; Higgins, John
The contemporary photographer, Joel-Peter Witkin, has described his remaking of some of the most iconic paintings in the history of art as a “divine revolt”. However, there are no attempts to unravel the meaning of this project nor to analyse the visual changes that Witkin has made. This thesis argues that Witkin's re-creations serve to subvert the negation or diminishment of ugliness in art history's depictions of the mystical, and to present the experience of ugliness as alternatively inherently Godly. Through engaging in the problems in philosophical aesthetics, it contrasts the notions “aesthetically ugly” (a quality that cannot be objectively identified and studied because it ascribes aesthetic non-worth) with the “ugly aesthetic”, which refers to the “perceptive-felt” experience of an object. By integrating descriptions of this experience of the ugly aesthetic with those of the early development stage of the “psychoanalytic pre-symbolic”, it provides heuristics with which to identify perceptual identifiers ugly objects, ugly worlds and the expression of ugly feelings in mystical invocations of paintings of three chosen art historical periods and Witkin's recreations. In his reconstructing of the heavenly realms given Renaissance paintings of Leda and the Swan (1510-1515) and The Birth of Venus (1485), Witkin makes a “pre-symbolic” space with ugly objects to present a contrary vision of an ugly dwelling place for God. In amending the Catholic Baroque's Little Fur (1638) and the Protestant Baroque's Still Life of Game, Fish, Fruit and Kitchen Utensils (1646), the artist replaces mystical feelings that imbue scenes of ugly objects with an expression of ugly feelings themselves, thereby guiding the viewer into a full immersion into these objects the real site of Godly experience instead. This theoretical formulation and its application to the works at hand, evidence that Witkin's work points to the mystical power of the ugly aesthetic to unleash a personal and collective memory of Godly reality as ontologically formless and mysterious, and thereby makes a case for ugliness' value.
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Reading restitution in District Six: law, discourse and 'governmentality'
(2012) Macdonald, Robert; Higgins, John
This thesis carries out an interdisciplinary textual analysis of the legal documents (primarily contracts and court documents) used to negotiate and fix the terms of the statutory land restitution process in District Six, Cape Town, during the period from 1996 to 2012. Utilizing French philosopher Michel Foucault's theorisation of 'discourse' and 'governmentality', it traces the interweaving of restitution's legislative concepts with heterogeneous political and cultural discourses emanating from District Six's unique history. It is argued that the hybridised configurations of discourse generated by this encounter serve as new instruments of power in the space of this restitution project, lending themselves to a range unintended and sometimes paradoxical material outcomes.
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Stranger than fiction : the case histories of Sigmund Freud
(2001) Long-Innes, F A V; Higgins, John
The general aim of this study is to arrive at a critical assessment of the cultural-historical significance of Freud' s major case histories, through a close examination of three of the most famous: the cases of "Dora", "Schreber" and the "WolfMan". My investigation of the case histories themselves is prefaced, in Chapter One, by a selective review of some major strands in the recent critical tradition.
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This is not an exit : some perspective on George Bataille's "General Economy" in the Age of Consumer Capitalism
(2002) Anthony, Ross; Higgins, John
In the past decade, the writings of George Bataille have become increasingly influential in spheres such as literary criticism, philosophy and economic theory. One particular strain of his work which has gained influence in recent times, is his theory of excess, which he calls the "general economy". In this dissertation, I wish to apply certain aspects of this concept to consumer Capitalism. In particular, I wish to examine Bataille's notion of "heterogeneity" and its relevance in contemporary Western society.
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Truffaut Un-Sutured : a psychogeographical reading of The 400 Blows
(2002) Hansen, Signe; Higgins, John
In its application to cinema, suturing denotes the process by which ﬁlm narrative is rendered seamless. This enables the identiﬁcation required for a spectator to become the subject of a ﬁlm and also functions to conceal the ﬁlm’s ideological mechanisms. In a critical survey of existing criticism of Francois Truffaut's ﬁlms in general, and The 400 Blows in particular, the dissertation argues that the majority of this scholarship colludes with the textual suturing process by neglecting to pose ideological questions of the ﬁlms. An application of the Situationist theory of psychogeography to The 400 Blows serves as a counter to this critical trend. The concept is not only thematically pertinent to the ﬁlm, but also provides an analytical tool to un-suture the ﬁlmic text and thereby to situate The 400 Blows ideologically. By focusing on the interaction between individuals and a socially conditioned environment, a psychogeographical reading combines a psychoanalytical and materialist analysis of the ﬁlm. This critical perspective departs from most existing scholarship by insisting on the ﬁlm as a discursive response to a particular socio-historical context. Based on a reading of the ﬁlm’s conclusion as signifying Trufauts un-suturing of his own text, the dissertation argues that the director’s discourse challenges hegemonic codes by asserting the desire for a self-determined situation. Contending that this is commensurate with a rejection of the passive subjecthcod dictated by consumerist culture, it concludes that the ﬁlm represents a form of discursive psychogeography. This supports the argument for situating Truffaut and the Situationists together in what Raymond Williams terms a structure of feeling, the shared ideological context that ﬁnally serves to validate a psychogeographical reading of The 400 Blows.