Letter to a Dead Playwright: Daily Grind, Vicki Reynolds, and Archive Fever
’Nothing is less reliable, nothing is less clear today than the word “archive”,’ observed Jacques Derrida in his book Archive Fever: a Freudian Impression (1996). This paper reflects on the unsettling process of establishing (or commencing) an archive for the Melbourne Workers Theatre, to form part of the AusStage digital archive which records information on live performance in Australia. Glenn D'Cruz's paper juxtaposes two disparate but connected registers of writing: an open letter to a deceased Australian playwright, Vicki Reynolds, and a critical reflection on the politics of the archive with reference to Derrida's account of archive fever, which he characterizes as an ‘irrepressible desire to return to the origin, a homesickness, a nostalgia for the return to the most archaic place of absolute commencement’. Using Derrida's commentary on questions of memory, authority, inscription, hauntology, and heritage to identify some of the philosophical and ethical aporias he encountered while working on the project, D’Cruz pays particular attention to what Derrida calls the spectral structure of the archive, and stages a conversation with the ghosts that haunt the digitized Melbourne Workers Theatre documents. He also unpacks the logic of Derrida's so-called messianic account of the archive, which ‘opens out of the future’, thereby affirming the future-to-come, and unsettling the normative notion of the archive as a repository for what has passed. Glenn D’Cruz teaches at Deakin University, Australia. He is the author of Midnight's Orphans: Anglo-Indians in Post/Colonial Literature (Peter Lang, 2006) and editor of Class Act: Melbourne Workers Theatre 1987–2007 (Vulgar Press, 2007).
Access to digitized performance documentation and the AusStage database
ABSTRACT The digitization of video documentation and other production documentation (photographic images, scripts, programmes, reviews, stage designs and audio recordings) of live performances can be accessed across the world through the Internet. At the same time, protocols requisite for the effective flow of data constrain how digitized artefacts of an innately ephemeral process are ‘packaged’ and linked for appropriate accessibility. Ironically, the digitization of such ephemera by no means guarantees their permanence as digital formats and modes of storage and retrieval are constantly vulnerable to changing industry standards and competitive commercial interests. Burvill and Seton track their experiences and reflections in pursuing the process of preparing an existing physical archive of an Australian, nationally regarded, community theatre company Sidetrack Performance Group (formerly Sidetrack Theatre Company) http://www.sidetrack.com.au for digitization and archiving into a university E-Repository. This archive is linked to the AusStage database providing an accessible research facility for investigating live performances and, simultaneously, in-forming histories of theatre and performance in Australia. The dynamic of enabling and constraining, at the same time, is highlighted as guidelines are formulated for the digitization, archiving and linking of performance assets so that the values of respect, integrity, justice and beneficence are applied to all stakeholders in the process.
The Cosmopolitan Imagination: The Renewal of Critical Social Theory
Gerard Delanty provides a comprehensive assessment of the idea of cosmopolitanism in social and political thought which links cosmopolitan theory with critical social theory. He argues that cosmopolitanism has a critical dimension which offers a solution to one of the weaknesses in the critical theory tradition: failure to respond to the challenges of globalization and intercultural communication. Critical cosmopolitanism, he proposes, is an approach that is not only relevant to social scientific analysis but also normatively grounded in a critical attitude. Delanty's argument for a critical, sociologically oriented cosmopolitanism aims to avoid, on the one hand, purely normative conceptions of cosmopolitanism and, on the other, approaches that reduce cosmopolitanism to the empirical expression of diversity. He attempts to take cosmopolitan theory beyond the largely Western context with which it has generally been associated, claiming that cosmopolitan analysis must now take into account non-Western expressions of cosmopolitanism.