Meaning and Identity: An Interdisciplinary Perspective

By Michael Hemmingsen

Meaning and Identity: An Interdisciplinary Perspective explores the construction of meaning, linguistically and culturally, and the relationship this bears to the production of identity. It looks at meaning and identity from a range of perspectives, including meaning-making and the identity of cities, the construction of national narratives and historical explanation, gender and sexuality, linguistic meaning in the context of poetry and literature, and the role of shared culture on the creation of meaning.

Some eighteen professors have contributed to this volume, which brings together scholars from a range of disciplines, including philosophy, psychology, linguistics, indigenous studies, sociology and social policy, history, international relations, art and art history, media studies, theatre, law and classics.

Each of the main six articles is followed by two responses from scholars outside the author’s discipline. Hence it generates a dialogue and raises a range of issues, classical and contemporary.

This book has wide interest and will be useful to scholars at all levels throughout the humanities and social sciences.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Society for Philosophy & Culture
• Release date: Apr 10, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301904372

Book preview

Published by Society for Philosophy & Culture at Smashwords

Copyright 2013 Michael Hemmingsen & J.L. Shaw

Meaning and Identity

An Interdisciplinary Perspective

Edited by

Michael Hemmingsen & J.L. Shaw

Society for Philosophy & Culture

Wellington

2013

Published by

Society for Philosophy & Culture

Wellington, NZ

2013

[e-mail]

© Michael Hemmingsen

ISBN: 978-1-301-90437-2

Contributors

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Michael Hemmingsen & J.L. Shaw

On the Scene: Making Music in Creative Cities

Geoff Stahl

Reading Between the Lines of the Creative City

Erin Mercer

Science Fiction 2001

Laura Preston

Love Even But There is Not Identity: J.C. Beaglehole and the Production of National Knowledge in a Transnational Context

Dolores Janiewski

Woollaston Performing a Photobomb

Rebecca Rice

Ehara i te mea, Nō nāianei te aroha, Nō nga tūpuna, Tuku iho, tuku iho

Brendan Hokowhitu

Post-Marxism and History: Baudrillard and the Classics

Arthur Pomeroy

Add a Theorist and Stir?: Towards Greater Historical Reflexivity

Ben Thirkell-White

The Heritages of Marxism and Baudrillard’s Influence on Classics

Alexander Maxwell

Augustinian Teleology and an Aspect of Current New Zealand Health Policy

Mark Masterson

Sex, Knowledge and Politics: Explaining Why Pharmac Does Not Fund Drug Treatment for Erectile Dysfunction

Carol Harrington

Gender Conforming Bodies: Consent, Sexuality and the Criminal Law

Elisabeth McDonald

Levels of Meaning

J.L. Shaw

Levels of Meaning: A Response from Linguistic Phenomenology

Sky Marsen

Discursive Psychology and the Accomplishment of Meaning

Ann Weatherall

We’re all in this together: Thinking about Culture, the Same, and Mass

Mike Lloyd

The Unbearable Lightness of Philosophy: A Response to Sociology’s Mass of Evidence

Sondra Bacharach

Of Mass, Movement and Everyday Life

Anne Galloway

Contributors

Sondra Bacharach is a Senior Lecturer in the Philosophy Programme at Victoria University of Wellington. Her primary research interests are in the philosophy of art and in epistemology. She recently held a Marsden grant to understand collaborative art, and is currently a Board of Trustees of the American Society for Aesthetics.

Anne Galloway is Senior Lecturer in the School of Design, Victoria University of Wellington. Anne is fascinated by the role of new technologies in everyday life, and tries to find ways for the social sciences and design to work together to better understand material, visual and discursive culture. Anne blogs about her research at www.designculturelab.org.

Carol Harrington lectures in sociology and social policy at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, where she has taught courses on family policy, gender, social movements, social policy and social theory She is author of Politicization of Sexual Violence from Abolitionism to Peacekeeping (Ashgate, 2010) and a number of articles concerned with gender and peacekeeping. Her current research interests focus upon questions related to gender, militarism and feminist activism.

Michael Hemmingsen, McMaster University, Canada, is the editor of Human Beings and Freedom: An Interdisciplinary Perspective, and author of Vedānta and Post-Modern Cosmopolitanism: A Reconstruction, Unconventional Interpretations: Deleuze and the Vedānta on Spinoza, and Post-Modern Cosmopolitanism and Discourse Ethics. He has studied International Relations and Philosophy at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. His interests include political philosophy – particularly around public discourse and equality – human rights, and metaethics. His current research is looking at how to model public discourse in a way that allows full expression to currently excluded epistemologies, and in particular indigenous forms of knowledge.

Dolores Janiewski is an Associate Professor in the School of History, Philosophy, Political Science & International Relations, Victoria University of Wellington, where she teaches and researches primarily in U.S. history. She is currently working on a project on the emergence of conservatism in the United States and developing research interests in the comparative development of surveillance states.

Mike Lloyd is a sociologist in the school of Social and Cultural Studies at Victoria University of Wellington. He has published on a wide variety of topics, but recently has been focusing on sociological analyses of humour, and everyday life. This has included work on a cartoon caption competition, the Flight of the Conchords television series, stand-up comedy, and celebrity formation.

Sky Marsen is a linguist and semiotician. Her interests include the semiotics of language, written discourse analysis, and narrative in different media. She is the author of the books Narrative Dimensions of Philosophy: Semiotic Explorations in the Work of Merleau-Ponty, Kierkegaard and Austin (Palgrave, 2006), Communication Studies (Palgrave, 2006), and Professional Writing (Palgrave, 2007), as well as several articles on narrative theory, and written discourse. She is Senior Lecturer in Linguistics and Applied Language Studies at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand.

Mark Masterson is Senior Lecturer of Classics at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. He has published articles on a number of topics: on masculinity in the Thebaid of the Roman poet, Statius; on the professionalisation of the Roman architect in Vitruvius; and three articles on male same-sex desire – one on the anonymous fourth-century C.E. Historia Monachorum, another on Eugene O’Neill’s Mourning becomes Electra, and a third on the fourth oration of Julian the Apostate. He is at present completing a book manuscript on late-ancient manhood. He was the recipient of the 2006 Rehak Award for his article on the Historia Monachorum.

Alexander Maxwell is Senior Lecturer in History, specialising in East-Central Europe. He wrote his Ph.D. thesis at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Before coming to Victoria University of Wellington he taught in Wales and Nevada and held postdoctoral fellowships in Germany and Romania. His first monograph, Choosing Slovakia, examined the rise of Slovak nationalism. He has also written several articles on East European nationalism, translated a Panslav tract into English, edited a book on symbolic geography, and compiled a festschrift for Czech historian Miroslav Hroch. He is presently editing a book on German diasporas and a book nationalism and clothing, provisionally titled Patriots Against Fashion.

Elisabeth McDonald is an Associate Professor in the Law Faculty at Victoria University of Wellington. Her teaching and research spans criminal law, the law of evidence, law and sexuality and feminist legal theory. Her most recent large project relates to reforming pre-trial and trial process in cases of sexual offending (Victoria University Press, 2011). Her work on provocation and the killing of gay men has been recently re-published in The Library of Essays on Sexuality and the Law (Ashgate, 2011). She is a trustee of Intersex Trust Aotearoa/New Zealand.

Erin Mercer is Lecturer at Victoria University where she teaches in the English and Theatre programmes. She is the author of Repression and Realism in Post-War American Literature (Palgrave Macmillan 2011) and her work has appeared in journals such as the Journal of Commonwealth Literature, the Journal of New Zealand Literature and the Journal of New Zealand Studies. She is currently writing a book called Rereading the Real: Authenticity, Genre and New Zealand Literature, which examines the uneasy relationship between genres other than realism and what is considered canonical literature in New Zealand.

Arthur Pomeroy is Professor of Classics at Victoria University of Wellington. He is the author of The Appropriate Comment: Death Notices in the Ancient Historians (1991), Arius Didymus: Epitome of Stoic Ethics (1999), Theatres of Action: Papers for Chris Dearden (co-edited with John Davidson, 2003), Roman Social History: A Sourcebook (with Tim Parkin, 2007), Then it was destroyed by the Volcano: Classics on the Large and Small Screen (2008), and various articles on a wide range of Latin authors (especially Tacitus) and on the reception of the ancient world in modern film and television.

Laura Preston is Curator at the Adam Art Gallery, Victoria University of Wellington. Her Master of Arts thesis in Art History examined the philosophy of space and its relationship to the histories of time-based media.

Rebecca Rice is a Fractional Lecturer in Art History and Collection Manager for the VUW Art Collection at Victoria University of Wellington. She was awarded her doctorate, titled The State Collections of Colonial New Zealand Art: Intertwined Histories of Collecting and Display, in 2010.

Jaysankar Lal Shaw is Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. Shaw studied at Calcutta University before going on to receive his Ph.D.at Rice University, Houston. He has taught at Jadavpur University, Calcutta, the University of Alabama, and the University of Hawaii. His work includes eighty-five papers and eleven books, such as Human Beings and Freedom: An Interdisciplinary Perspective, Knowledge, Belief and Doubt: Some Contemporary Problems and their Solutions from the Nyaya Perspective; Causality and Its Application: Samkhya, Bauddha and Nyaya; Some Logical Problems Concerning Existence; and Analytical Philosophy in Comparative Perspective.

Geoff Stahl is a Senior Lecturer in Media Studies at Victoria University in Wellington. His research and publications include work on music scenes and cultural life in Berlin, Montreal and Wellington. He is also a co-author of Understanding Media Studies (Oxford University Press).

Ben Thirkell-White is Senior Lecturer in International Relations at Victoria University of Wellington. He researches global economic governance and critical international relations theory. He is co-editor with Nicholas Rengger of Critical International Relations Theory After 25 Years (Cambridge University Press 2007).

Ann Weatherall is a Reader in the School of Psychology. Her research lies within the general area of social psychology. She has particular interests in discursive psychology and conversation analysis; feminist psychology, and sex/gender and sexuality.

Acknowledgements

The editors would like to thank a number of people, without whose help this book would not have been possible. In particular, Jenny Ombler, who organised in large part the seminar series on which this volume is based, deserves particular attention, as well as those individuals – and there are a number – who provided essential feedback on individual chapters of the book. We would like to take this opportunity to convey our thanks to the following members of the Society for Philosophy and Culture: Matthew Macdonald, Reece Baker, Matthew O’Leary, Piripi Whaanga and Simon Bunckenburg for their assistance in organising seminars and book launches. We are also grateful to our community and the Victoria University of Wellington Students" Association for their help in funding some of our events. Additionally, we are very grateful to the New Zealand Indian High Commission, as High Commissioners such as K. Ernest and S. Mehta have inaugurated some of our seminars and encouraged us to continue dialogue between East and West. Our heartfelt thanks goes also to Mr P.K. Bhattacharya, the proprietor of Punthi Pustak, for his eagerness to publish this volume.

Introduction

Michael Hemmingsen & J.L. Shaw

This volume was developed from a series organised at Victoria University of Wellington in 2011, involving scholars from sixteen disciplines. The main purpose of the series, and this book, is to examine broad issues of contemporary interest – meaning and identity – from an interdisciplinary point of view. It encourages people from different spaces within the university to come together and collaborate with one another, giving rise to the kind of cross-pollinated, open-minded and thoughtful scholarship that is so difficult in the current hyper-specialised academic environment.

Meaning and Identity: An Interdisciplinary Perspective focuses on the construction of meaning, linguistically and culturally, and the relationship this bears to the production of identity. It looks at meaning and identity from a range of perspectives, including meaning-making and the identity of cities, the construction of national narratives and historical explanation, gender and sexuality, linguistic meaning in the context of poetry and literature, and the role of shared culture on the creation of meaning.

The most distinctive feature of the book is that it encourages discussion or scope for disagreement over a particular view or thesis put forward by leading philosophers or artists. This is due to the fact that the structure of the book involves six sections, each composed of three chapters: one main chapter, acting as a provocation, with two responses from scholars in disciplines other than that of the author of the main chapter. Hence, there are twelve responses on six main papers, by a range of thinkers from disciplines such as philosophy, history, sociology and social policy, cultural studies, design, linguistics, classics, indigenous studies, law, theatre, art and art history, media studies, psychology and international relations. Hence, each paper generates a dialogue and raises a range of issues not mentioned in the main paper. Since there are eighteen papers dealing with meaning and identity from various points of view, this book will broaden the horizon or the perspective of contemporary scholars of different countries. Hence, it presents a holistic picture without abandoning the distinctiveness of each contribution.

Each thinker comes at the themes of meaning and identity, and the relationship between the two, from different perspectives, focusing on examples and features that come out the concerns of their own disciplinary researches: for example, Geoff Stahl examines meaning-making in music scenes, and how we go about constructing the identity of cities; Dolores Janiewski looks at how meaning has been constructed in the context of New Zealand history, particularly regarding the formation of New Zealand’s national identity; Arthur Pomeroy discusses the way that modern theoretical models have (and perhaps shouldn’t be) used to construct meaning from events in ancient history; Mark Masterson utilises an Augustinian framework to make sense of New Zealand’s problematic policy regarding post-prostate surgery treatments for sexual dysfunction; J.L. Shaw’s interest is the various ways we gain meaning from words, phrases and sentences; and Mike Lloyd’s paper is concerned with the way in which shared culture enables us to glean the same meaning, independently, of events and texts.

The commentary on these pieces is similarly diverse: speaking to Stahl’s paper, Erin Mercer argues for recognising the multiplicity of meanings and identities of a city, while Laura Preston discusses the way that we desire to pin down the meaning and identity of a city. In response to Janiewski, Rebecca Rice’s piece is concerned with how national identity has been constructed through national art and artists, and Brendan Hokowhitu examines the way in which national identity has effaced indigenous ontologies. Ben Thirkell-White, commenting on Pomeroy, emphasises the problems with explaining ancient events using tools created for making sense of modernity, and Alexander Maxwell remarks on how various scholars, all in the broadly Marxist tradition, have gleaned contradictory meanings from the same events. Reflecting on Masterson’s chapter, Carol Harrington comments that, rather than Augustine, it is the meanings given to the identities of old and young that explain New Zealand’s health policy, while Elisabeth McDonald observes that New Zealand’s health policy on gender reassignment surgery is similarly and equally confused, and has devastating consequences for gender identity and sexual functioning. Responding to Shaw and linguistic meaning, Sky Marsen emphasises the way that our embodiment is central to our abilities to make and share meaning, and Ann Weatherall discusses the way that language exists for the purpose of achieving shared meaning and intersubjective understanding. Finally, as a response to Lloyd, Sondra Bacharach compares Lloyd’s sociological approach to the philosophical method, praising his emphasis on shared meaning, rather than the contingent, while Anne Galloway discusses the way that the use of images can add to sociological, due to the fact that their meanings cannot be captured fully in words.

Geoff Stahl, a scholar in media studies, in his paper On the Scene: Making Music in Creative Cities, an impressionistic discussion of three cities – Montreal, Berlin and Wellington – has discussed the identity of cities, focussing on music, art and culture. Stahl explores way that the meaning and identity of these cities is constructed through music scenes, and looks at the way these cities are cognitively mapped, and how the horizons of a city’s possibilities are framed.[1] He also refers to the creative life of the city, the role culture plays in defining the identity of a city, and how these function for artists. His work is not purely theoretical, as it is based on interviews with music-makers, and the discursive frames used by them. Stahl refers to the images of a city captured by the media in cultural practice. He talks about the comparison between cities for understanding their identity and meaning, as one provokes thoughts of the other. The images associated with the identity of a city are myths, skylines, icons, public transport, restaurants and their ambiences, cafe cultures, music, celebrations of festivals, etc. Different places or icons of a city refract its meanings, stirring the imagination of artists, painters, poets and sculptures. The icons, streets, boulevards, malls and skylines mean something: they have semantic power which is open to interpretation and analysis.[2] Hence, they give rise to different approaches to the study of signs in a city, which may be considered as a subfield of semiotics. These signs and symbols express not only the cultural aspect but also the social dimensions of city life.

Stahl examines various music scenes in Montreal, Berlin and Wellington through the lens of urban semiotics, which allows him to explore the web of meanings and textures within which a city’s population are enmeshed.[3] By studying urban signs such as scenes, Stahl argues, we can not only gain a further appreciation for the ways in which meaning is created within a city for its inhabitants, and how we construct a city’s identity, but we can also trouble naturalised readings of city spaces, to reveal the ideological underpinnings of various sites and practices.[4]

By way of comparison between the three cities, the author claims that Montreal is a bohemian city characterised by myths of laissez-faire and the hipster culture, but Berlin represents a culture transformed by the fall of the Wall and the unification of its two halves. It figured as the centre for the promotion of arts, enterprises and creativity of individuals, which are visible in the gallery, music, theatre, film and new media scenes. To substantiate his claims, Stahl mentions the festival of adventurous music and related visual arts known as CTM, which has encouraged artists to experiment with different types of music, thereby creating a new image of Berlin as a city of vibrant music festivals with links to global transnational networks. Hence CTM has created a locus for the promotion of local artistic life, signifying the ideals of less Income, more Experience. As the culture evolves, the new ideals are encouraged and the city’s identity changes. In the case of Berlin, it is known as New Berlin after the unification of East and West.

To emphasise the identity of Wellington’s cultural life, the author refers to the music known as Fat Freddy’s Drop, among many other creative activities of the cultural space and meeting places, including restaurants. He defines identity in terms of attachments, affiliations, affinities and belongings to places, as they give meaning to our activities.

Although Montreal, Berlin and Wellington are separated by geography, history and language, they share certain aspects of culture such as creativity in art, music-making, and the representation of scenes. So there are some common features, but the way scenes unfold or creativity is manifested in different cities are different; and therein lies their identities, uniquenesses and meanings.

As a response to this piece, Mercer discusses her experience of the city of Florence. Mercer, a scholar of English and Theatre, emphasises how familiarity with a city gives rise to certain thoughts or emotions related to the use of the German expression Heimlich, signifying cosy, non-domestic, something hidden from the eyes of strangers. Stahl’s paper emphasises the creative aspects of the signs and symbols of Montreal, Berlin and Wellington. On the contrary, Erin, with reference to a series of signs of Florence, emphasises the museum aspect of the city. She also makes the claim that the city itself is a museum. Hence the past, or the persistent aspect of Florence, completely obscures the present. Hence the signs or the symbols of a city signify the past or the present. She raises the issue of whether a particular type of creativity is marketed, and how it is related to an economy, including profit-oriented corporate developments.

Nevertheless, Mercer suggests that, if we consider cities as texts, as Stahl suggests – as a series of signs to be read and interpreted[5] – then any given urban environment has a multiplicity of meanings: there are numerous versions of the city, perhaps as many versions as there are subjectivities to interpret it. In giving us access to particular versions of a city’s identity, urban semiotics at the same time highlights particular versions which are avoided or obscured.[6] Florence, Mercer says, typically identifies itself as a museum city; that is, not just a city with a lot of museums, but also a city that is itself a museum.[7] By exploring scenes in Florence, however, we can tell stories about the city that counter the dominant narrative of Florence-as-museum-city, uncovering the multiplicity of meanings the city has for its inhabitants.

Preston approaches Stahl’s chapter through the work of the artists Isa Genzken and Wolfgang Tillmans. Their work illustrates, she says, the way that the city is also an elusive image caught in a state between the imagined and the real; built from a series of changing scenes.[8] However, she argues that despite the illusoriness of the identity of a city, there is always a desire to pin down the image, take a snapshot, and to locate it for one’s own.[9] Scenes, she suggests, music or otherwise, are heterotopic spaces:[10] that is, spaces that are utopian in claiming transparency yet obscure their re-enforcement of power.[11] In performing ourselves within these heterotopias, the city becomes our own reflection, an image that

does not deny the actualities of living within the built environment and within its infrastructure nor trivialise the power of ideology that determines our experiences of place, but is an image nonetheless; constantly moving and changing through time.[12]

Moving from the identity of cities to the identity of nations, Janiewski writes in ‘Love Even But There is Not Identity’: J.C. Beaglehole and the Production of National Knowledge in a Transnational Context about the formation of a nationalist identity in New Zealand on the part of New Zealand historians. By examining prominent New Zealander historians such as J.C. Beaglehole, J.G.A. Pocock, James Belich, and others, Janiewski argues that there has been an ongoing transnational dilemma for New Zealand historians, consisting of a tension between an acknowledgement that historians, who must venture out in search of knowledge as [Beaglehole] had done when he voyaged to Britain in the mid-l920s,[13] had to [owe] allegiance to more than one nation,[14] and the persistent desire to have one place, where you truly belong… a promised land.[15] Hence, Janiewski points out that successive generations of New Zealand historians have engaged in this arduous negotiation between an externally-developing discipline and their responsibilities to the nation and its people.[16] National knowledge in New Zealand is produced in a transnational context out of the interplay between the local and the global, the provincial and the cosmopolitan.[17] Hence, Janiewski contends that an examination of New Zealand historiography illuminates interactions between imperial expansion, state formation, the construction of nation-building narratives, and the transnational context of historical scholarship.

In her commentary, Rice takes up the issue of New Zealand identity and history from the perspective