Reflections
Parkinson is 'back' in Australia. Like some regularly occurrent comet on a fixed orbit, Parkinson hoves into view from time to time, a 'regular' figure in our land — one of those industry figures (Danny La Rue, Max Bygraves, Spike Milligan) who, like royalty, traverse the country and tilt out into invisibility.
This time (mid - '83), Parkinson does his usual. From their Hollywood apogees, the older stars and asteroids come, dock briefly and resume their orbits — burnt out satellites, perhaps, momentarily illuminated by the rising suns they share the set with (Australians mostly: the reflected glory cuts both ways). This time round, however, Parky also entertains the pollies — Bob Hawke, media star, and the recycled, post-Commission Neville Wran. Hawke's co-guest is his double, Max Gillies. Wran's is both his wife, Jill, and Derryn Hinch (minus Jackie). Everyone is 'back' (from England, from the threat of political extermination, even just 'back from a long time away').
Marx thought public euphoria following on from bourgeois revolutions from the point of view of 'stardom'. The 'Bonapartist', rather than the Bonaparte, fronts a public spectacle which (like the sports successes through which Hawke has become highly visible as 'winner among winners'):
storms swiftly from success to success; the dramatic effects outdo each other; people and things seem set in sparkling brilliance; ecstasy is the everyday spirit. (Marx 1962: 250)
Marx's astronomical imagery is pursued as he observes that soon such historical 'breaks' 'reach their zenith and a long crapulent depression lays hold of society'. The revolution is, as Jeffrey Mehlmann (1977: 2) usefully reminds us, also primarily astronomical — 'the action ... of moving round in orbit on in a circular course; the return or recurrence of a point or period of time' (OED). The revolution of 1789 'draped itself alternately as the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire, and the Revolution of 1848 knew nothing better to do than parody, now 1789, now the revolutionary tradition of 1793 to 1795', wrote Marx. (1962: 242). As a comment on the relationship of the Hawke Revolution to the Whitlam years, Marx's comment
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sticks. On Parky, however, Hawke does not appear in the context of any such Bonapartist parody. Rather the celestial bodies whose pantheon he occupies a place in are stars — Parky's stable of Hollywood has-beens or winners in the sports galaxy. But as he sparkles there on the set, in orbit with the others around Parky (himself in orbit with London night-life zombies prowling Australia forever), his radiance is picked up by another 'alfoil suit' on the set. And the other alfoil suit reflects it back, for Hawke is accompanied by his double, Max Gillies.
Hawke has no need for the parasitic relation to Whitlam that Louis Bonaparte had to Napoleon, for the space is already occupied by a third term in the parasitic chain. 'Little Caesar' as Patrick Cook calls him, is not 'little' in relation to a Napoleonic antecedent, but 'big' in relation to the simulacrum of himself (or to the Gillies simulacrum of himself) that Hawke drags round after himself in Cook's rendition. On the one hand, like Louis Napoleon, Hawke will emphasise the 'smallness' of his 'big' predecessor, refracting his own parodi-cal status (Marx wrote to Engels in 1858 that 'In point of fact, he is not only Napoleon Le Petit..., that is, the antithesis of Napoleon Le Grand : he personifies even more, and quite marvellously, the pettiness of the 'big' Napoleon'.) On the other hand, Hawke is equally able to appear 'big' by citing himself in relationship on Parky with a double who, like Gillies, writes Hawke 'larger than life', and who (as the perfect alibi for Hawke's own effacing Bonapartism, vis-a-vis Whitlam) will come out 'looking small'.
The city rat has invited the country rat to dinner (the farmer is away). The country rat invites his country cousin, the field rat, who bears a strong resemblance to him and allows the city rat's munificence to be reflected in his own magnanimity. Parky begins the show (as Michel Serres [1980: 7] writes on the Aesop fable, it is the city rat's right — 'he has produced nothing, his invitation costs him nothing ... The oil, the butter, the ham, the salt pork, the cheese, the whole lot is at his discretion. It is easy to invite his cousin from the country, and to chalk it up on the slate' — the slate here being Parky's advertisers), and immediately designates the other terms of the parasitical chain:
"Top politicians become superstars ... they get closeups, zooms, action replays... But the test is how they stand-up to imitation.”
As it turns out, it is the stand-up comic Gillies who stands up. Hawke sits and the fieldmouse does the work. The principle at work is what Hegel called the Aufhebung. the preface to the book may, since it summarises it, make the book redundant and make its long-winded earnestness look excessive and banal. But at the moment of the preface's annihilation of the main text, it glorifies it, promising an immortality that contradicts its (the preface's) seemingly destructive moment. Gillies stands there making Hawke 'look small', but
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Hegel's principle is magnificently at work. (Serres: 'So really what I would like to know is what that word means, 'produce'.) (1980: 10).
Shadows.
He was a nuisance, always hateful and at times I was really quite afraid of him; for he had made himself indispensible ... / had to suffer his eloquence and at times was almost forced to agree with him. A rich man must have a shadow in this world... Adalbert von Chamisso (1970)
Chamisso's Schlemihl (in the 1813 novella) has sold his real shadow to a strange Mephistophelian 'gray man'. As the 'gray man' pursues Schlemihl for a further exchange of his soul, the hero vainly grasps around for shadow-substitutes (for, rich as he is, Schlemihl cannot appear shadowless in public: he is too much an object of ridicule without one). The new possessor of the shadow complains too: 'We have become inseparable ... Neither of us now can have any rest. Did you ever hear of a shadow abandoning its master?' Like Diderot's encounter with the nephew of the French composer Rameau (in which the parasitic nephew parodies playing all the parts of his uncle's operas) the Parkinson encounter with Gillies and Hawke develops the 'ideal spectator' pose for the audience to follow, happily overshadowed by the other's brilliance. And so it is with Gillies, himself the shadow of a 'greater' figure, whom his parody itself makes great.
Parkinson 'appears' in Australia in a show which is actually called Parkinson in Australia (as in 'Gielgud in Hamlet, etc.). Max Gillies currently 'appears' in the show A Night of National Reconciliation. And while coming across as the ludicrous double of the Prime Minister, he also deflects the possibility of another double, namely Whitlam ('Alas, Poor Yorick ...' etc.). The parasitical shadow antecedent pariah is usefully displaced by the parasitical/shadow subsequent: to avoid being himself a parody of the pariah, Hawke submits himself to parody. So: Max Gillies, with his own autonomous show, 'appears' in Parkinson's show; but more importantly, Hawke, the object of the parody, appears in Gillies'-show-in-Parkinson's show. Conclusion: everyone is in every one else's show these days. This is called 'National Reconciliation' (and the 'time-honoured disguise, and borrowed language' Marx [1962: 247] writes of as the 'farcical' counter to the tragic 'break' of bourgeois revolutions is, in this conjuncture anyway, Showbiz, a language which, like language in general, both precedes and outlives the subject, a shadow which the subject casts as they speak, but which also 'casts' the subject, or the history).
The notice above the doorbell at Kinsela's in Sydney (which used to be a funeral parlour and is now the night-spot where A Night of National Reconciliation is playing) used to read: 'Your call has been heard. Please wait'. Kinsela's is a space populated by shades, ghosts and departed spirits. Nights now, Gillies the grim undertaker mimes
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the zombies. What is left after the dead are gone but the living? Faust's soul for one thing. Schlemihl's shadow, for another. But through the survival of these 'remainders', the parody 'phantasmagoria' which Marx reminds us is the inevitable sideshow of bourgeois revolution, the Faust or Schlemihl figure gains its immortality through apotheosis as living myth. Jean Baudrillard has this to say about the 'remainder' (shadow, shade): 'it doesn't even know of an opposing term, which (yet) overtakes it throughout the whole cycle, and runs forever after its own point of difference, after its own double, as Peter Schlemihl does after his own shadow'. Baudrillard continues:
The remainder is obscene, because it is irreversible and makes its exchanges (only) within itself. It is obscene and it makes you laugh, as does... the indistinguishability of life and death. (1981: 210)
The Parkinson show itself is such a 'phantasmagoria' {unheimlich but 'homely' as well) of people you thought were dead, or at least about to die. Memory (instant replay) functions on Parky as a machine for juggling life (possibility) and death (success) through a relay of voices, images, entrances, encounters (Dante-style) and exits that effectively construct the audience as a vast keyboard of recognition and forgetting (and then remembering). Even (and sometimes especially) forgotten faces and voices are resurrected and subjected to an apophrades, the wrestle between the 'live' and the 'mighty dead' (or invert the relation, between those glittering instances of northern hemisphere stardom and those whose talent is buried — 'Down Under' — and seems to need visible resurrection, even in the face of 'liveliness'). Yet, while the audience watches these unveilings (Koo Stark on Parkinson for instance), receiving them as initiating 'erotic' encounters' the encounters are already 'on account', already known, signed up and (as every audience member knows) paid for ($10,000 in Koo Stark's and Princess Ann's cases) in advance. Initial response is then always deferred (both backwards and forwards). Uniquely, in the case of Hawke's appearance, it is deferred in the direction of Gillies the body, the man, the 'artist' (and vice versa). Memory is still a parameter however: Hawke has a past life too (like Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard ox the actors and actresses usually on Parky) that acts as another sort of shadow, which, incidentially, Gillies, through his rhetoric and gesticulation of the 'success — Hawke', also takes up and absorbs. Hawke on Parky gells well with the usual pabulum of Parky stars: an old star in another show who is recycled through Parky (and shows it).
Unheimlich is Marx's word for the 'uncanny' throw-backs and ragbag trappings that accompany the bourgeois revolution. (For discussion of Marx's use of the word, see Mehlman, [1977] 'History').
The shadow is nothing: nothing in itself, it works up the bizarre choreography of the silhouette, the 'shadow-play'. It is no mistake.
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for example, that in the Indonesian wayung shadow-puppet play, the 'audience' prefers to sit on the side of the screen where the puppeteer is visible, and where the actual effect of the action is left for the tourists and the ruling class. The Max Gillies show at Kinsella's in turn produces an audience 'different' (a remainder?) from the TV audience for Hawke, or even Gillies-as-Hawke, on Parky. As a client audience, it seeks charismatic contact with the real thing, but fearing (justifiably it seems) that this sort of contact might not come up to scratch, settles for the parody version. Thus the remainder of Hawkism: 'audience' — a residual politics realised through its discovery of a new 'venue' (itself — Kinsela's — originally the place of a Great Departure) where the shadow politics of a 'shadow' cabinet (now-in-power) is shadowed by the 'formidable' (who's the better actor — Hawke or he?) Max Gillies.
Interlude: Premiers on Parky
Parkinson's Principle: fact that work will always last as long as the time available for it' (OED).
Peter Bowers, in The Sydney Morning Herald on the eve of the Queensland state election in 1983 (22.10.83) writes:
Trying to catch Bjelke-Petersen is like trying to catch Peter Pan. You are left struggling with a shadow (my emphasis).
The Peter Pan image is both discursively operative for Bowers and grotesque: as I write, the polls have returned Joh to government in Queensland. The Peter Pan principle is that of the 'boy who never became old'. The Petersen Pan principle exists simply in declaring power to be sempereternal (given that one holds it), located in the 'living' body. In the same way that Joh actually needs his detractors and parodists (Bowers notes that through his 'unfailing courtesy' — like Hawke's toleration of Gillies, adopting and priming an approach for the TV audience — Joh 'gets away with being a despot because he does not act like a despot'), so Hawke readily submits to (and, it could be said, constructs) the questioner as being primarily the origin of the 'ridiculous' or 'ludicrous' (lit. from ludicrum, 'stage-play' OED).
The Indonesian shadow-play is indisputably a play of 'parts' and contradictions — not least in that through the shadow, the rivets, snips and cuts and paintwork on the puppets can be seen. In Indonesian politics, the relevance of this sort of presentation is felt everywhere: what is going on is political allegory, but veiled and projected, where the light is behind the figures. Barthes (1977: 171), in an essay dealing with the puppets of Japanese bunraku, notes that even as a 'caricature of "life", bunraku affirms precisely thereby life's moral limits and serves to confine beauty and truth and emotion in the living body of the actor — he (sic) who nevertheless makes of that body a lie'. The body of the actor is, in Barthes' text, both that
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lie and also a 'visceral truth'. The Bjelke-Petersen body is, in this respect, 'Punch', the marionette who 'holds to the actor the mirror of his opposite’.
For Hawke/Gillies on Parky, the body is also the site of deferment. Hawke's televisual preenings underscore the verbal text — a 'self made' man, but also a man 'yet to be made' (hence the cuff-link adjustment, the hand to the nape of the neck, the various arrangements of hands to mouth, to chin and to hands per se). Allen Pease in an article for The Sydney Morning Herald (August 13, 1983) notes the camera-visual self-dismemberment of the Hawke body in these terms: tie-straightening means getting ready for the fray but deferring it; hands to mouth as if in prayer seem to prepare for the imminent arrival of the deity but in fact short-circuit back to the agony of Hawke in the process of self-production (or perhaps lying in wait for the Hawke impersonator that out-Hawkes Hawke).
While the image of Bjelke-Petersen on TV is one of the fascinations of self-regeneration, that of Hawke is of constant self-monitoring, with reference to Hawke's own preconceived images of himself — whether this turns out to be a checking through of his own gesture-repertoire in Gillies (over-determined) or his own well-known practice of watching video replays of his own performances (under-determined and yet to be finally' arrived at). The constant narcissism of the self-observing Hawke ('alive amongst his mirrors') finds its place, in the end, not so much in Hawke's parodist, but in Hawke himself, the mirror of the mirror.
Neville and Jill Wran's appearance on Parky introduced the body as not something to be puppeteered by the possessor of the body, but in the true form of bodies under control of the marionette's strings (but yet struggling to be 'free', in the manner of learnt theatrical models — Coppelia or Pygmalion). The Wran bodies appeared on Parky after the outcome of the Street Commission into premierial intervention into the court system. Whereas clothes (the alfoil suit or the reefer jacket with 'Australia' written all over it that Hawke was persuaded to wear before TV cameras in Perth after the America's Cup victory) are the Hawke theatre, the 'objective correlative' of the Wran body is the body itself. The 'blowtorch applied to the belly' conjuring up an era of torture now presumably past, but suitably working-class in reference, is one of Neville Wran's favorite ideas. (It means putting the heat on adversaries, not with the idea necessarily of destroying them, but of alchemically changing them.) More recently, after Wran successfully masked the issue of corruption (October 1983) in the jail management system with the wonderful idea that the Opera House might be 'gutted' to put opera where it was 'always' meant to be (in the Concert Hall — no more concerts!) Wran employed the extraordinary concept of confusion that somehow 'surrounded' the whole idea with the words:
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"All those who have got their bowels in a knot about gutting the Opera House and $500 million (the price put on the project by certain media writers) can sleep in their beds tonight" (Sydney Morning Herald 23.10.83).
Such imagery usually bears on the Wran body itself. (To a gay rights 'exorcism of homophobia' vigil outside Wran's own house, where Wran complained of invasion of privacy, gay rights activists wondered on air about the Wran government's invasion of their privacy.) Wran's St Sebastian image on TV (the clagged-out throat etc.) found a 'healthy' vehicle on Parky when the Wrans appeared there in September, 1983.
Tableau: The Wrans enter hand in hand ('me and my shadow'). The Premier proceeds to knock over a glass of water put there, hopefully, to slake his ailing throat (thereby underscoring the vulnerability of the Wran gorge). The Wrans, thanks to the Royal Commission, are 'up to the armpits in blood and gore'. Neville himself is 'up to my eyeballs'. Public life, he observes, 'exacts a mean price'. The morality of the scene is that of a martyrdom: ultimate loss with maximum mythic reimbursement. The Wran throat comes up — there have been rumours that he is seeing his throat surgeon. Jill has developed a 'thick skin .... I feel like a turtle developing a carapace to retreat into'. Later, she traces this back to a primal scene: her grandfather found her, in her childhood eating snails. 'You need a cast-iron stomach... maybe I can develop this carapace'. (The concern with stomachs cannot be avoided. On the one hand, it is a matter of 'applying the blowtorch'. A more adaptive (read: evolutionary, post-Sebastian) strategy is to 'develop' the 'cast-iron gut'.
The Wran image on Parky then is, on the one hand, of physical vulnerability (no Peter Pan here). On the other, it is an image congruent with the forms of nature and, in specific, of anatomies and physical economies. An extension of the image of the body 'simply growing' before the TV camera (the speech-impedimented Alan Seale neatly congruent with the Wran throat here) is that of the Wrans as 'organic' inheritors of a form of speech, habitude of appearance (access to media) and naturalness of partnership. 'All the romance', says Wran, 'is on Jill's side ... I'm the pallid wallflower.' Later, Parky asks if the Royal Commission became a 'test of friends': 'were some found wanting', for instance? This time, weeds are out: 'We're OK people ... (we came up) smelling like a rose'. During their abeyance from State politics, the Wrans were able to be true to a truer role of cultivation and conservation: the dogs and cats were fed, the milk was collected, they climbed Barrington Tops, and 'another symbolic thing — as our own humour came back, so did the weeds. We loved rooting them out.' The zoom into landscape and out into bodyscape is handled by the Channel 10 (Sydney) cameras in exemplary fashion. The roses grow and smell nice ('Opera Thrives'); weeds are expunged. Some bellies get the blowtorch; some others are
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carapaced. Some (talking) heads get to be on Parky; in other cases, Neville might 'kick a few heads in' (but then a position of fall-back: really Wran only wants to 'get everyone back on their feet').
Puppets (Grand Guignol)
The walk down the ramp on to TV space on Parkinson can be a trying experience. Marion Macdonald (Sydney Morning Herald 22.10.83) describes the entry of Princess Ann and Mark Phillips as 'an excellent bag for Parky, this reticent couple.' As Ann walks down the 'runway', Macdonald wonders about the 'standing' of the people concerned, vis-a-vis, their ability to carry off this TV 'baring-of-all. One wonders: is this the nadir of the political 'walk-about' (congruent perhaps with the demise of the doctor's house-call)?
The walk to 'the wired seat' (the interview chair where the interviewees can themselves get close-up where they want to interject something) is the reward for the gut-clenching walk down the ramp. Once there, the Parky clientele 'beat their brains' out for plausible prime-time answers — the Parkinson Principle 'in Australia'.
The issue of 'legs' (as both the necessity for 'walking the mile' to the Parky space and as the vulnerable spot given an overall feat of a public kneecapping) is something that desultorily connects the Parky/Hawke interview with the Wran interview. Apart from negotiating a relation of masculinity with Parkinson (the English working-class study turned video pansy, and yet redeemable by finding 'his feet' with other similarly endangered sexual species), legs come 'up' in both the Hawke and Wran interviews. In the Hawke appearance (Gillies having gone out for a body-change in transition from Hawke-apparition to Fraser-apparition), the PM is asked, from the floor, by a female member of the studio audience, 'I would like to know the physical characteristics of your ideal woman'. Hawke parries, obfuscates. Parky, in turn, goads: "You can't claim you haven't thought about that'. Hawke ripostes: 'No, not for the last 40 years'. After more spice from the audience questioner, Hawke 'gives': 'OK, I like beautiful legs. There you are. Beautiful legs.' The production of the masculine is surely here involved: the endangered masculine (political) body seeks alibi in the doll-like disintegration of a female one. In Parky's interview with the Wrans, Jill Wran is, for some reason, asked why she (Jill) and he (Neville co-orbited. The answer is: 'Neville was after my mind' and then: 'When we met, I sensed his eyes on my legs.'
When Jill and Neville Wran met with Parky on TV, they had 'just recovered from', as Jill said, 'not having a leg to stand on'. Hawke, July 1983, was 'just finding his legs' by comparison. Walking down the Parky ramp, representing and involving one's body in rhetoric and hopefully being able to clone it (Gillies or the wife, echoing similar doubts about the body's substantiality or vulnerability) becomes
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a matter of combining all former occurrences of the same body with all future projections of the same. Political bodies, sexual bodies, productive bodies and theatrical bodies focus on the body that descends the ramp on Parkinson: a whole history indicating a whole politics but, most importantly, a whole visibility (where is the shadow, under the glare of the TV lights, if not in the 'shape' of the audience, or the form of a Max Gillies?). The 'appearance' of the Prime Ministerial or Premierial body is not that of a newly born star, but of a complex palimpsest (a screen, in both senses: a masking of 'truth' and also the revelation of many truths, not in their complex-ness, but in their overlaying). The body in Parky 'appears' as the shadow redeemed: thankful for the shadow, but in a dreadful tussle with the shadow (ending up in a 'stymie', since the shadow must be, in the end, the index of the one that 'casts' the shadow — the beginning of a dramatis personae, of, literally, a cast). TV as the producer of this 'real' (read: 'history', for this is the way we surely see ourselves in Australia — midway between the 'makers' of history, and 'history', as in 'You're history', i.e., like the redundant history which starts from the impossibility of a 'future') inevitably takes its 'line' of thinking from already 'set' readings — a set of reference points, that both offer and preclude 'history'. Baudrillard (1981: 210), writing about the Peter Schlemihl story, comments:
Only the order (of discourse?) which is called 'real' allows for the privileging of the body as reference. But nothing in the symbolic order allows for a sharing out of either the one or the other (the body or the shadow). And it is this reversion of the shadow into the body, this lapse from the essential, into the term of the essential, under the onslaught of that-which-does-not-signify, this incessant feat of meaning in the fact of what remains (of meaning) that the finger-nail biting habit starts, or (to put it another way) the 'small other' object (objet petita) that makes for the charm, beauty and disturbing weirdness of the histories at hand.
To go down the ramp on the Parky show needs both a steady hand, a steady eye (to 'eye out' the camera) and two feet. The elementary question asked by the Sphinx (TV?) was what walks four-footed at morning, two-footed at noon and three-footed at night is one asked of the 'prospective' Oedipus (will he fulfil the role, the supreme one, of interviewee?) Or will he (in this case) choose the one-legged approach (or have it chosen)? Patrick Cook's Not the News has Hawke as a monobrach set on its pedestal, which 'he', Hawke carts around. The simulacrum could be Gillies himself. But it could be, also, his own past. More likely it is the image of Bonaparte (the exiled Whitlam?): not the uplifting 'double' of himself but the Whitla-mesque pariah (thought dead) which, like Marx's image of history, 'weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living'. (1962: 247).
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Masks.
God, what awful lungs! Nothing is less like him than himself At times he is thin and gaunt like someone in the last stages of consumption ...
Diderot, Rameau's Nephew.
60 Minutes in late July 1983 does a show on 'celebrity lookalikes' who give 'product endorsements'. The president of Ron Smith Lookalikes of L.A. says that it's 'an illusion of an illusion' that the business relies upon, and it's possible to reverse the statement: that the illusion of the illusion creates the illusion (parody of Lacan: 'desire is the desire for the desire of the other'). Chaplin and Sinatra are plums for lookalikes, but top dogs are those who are dead — the 'deceased lookalikes'. But what is death in this context? Four million people have seen the model ('mannequin') of John Glenn aseat at the controls of a simulation of U.S. space probe missiles at the Smithsonian Institute. Margaret Thatcher's weirdness is a Channel 4 hit in England in her clone version Anyone for Dennis?; Reagan is 'already' there from the films. Ron Smith says 'they consider it flattery' (referring to his QEII clones). The desire for the construction of the subject's desire in the other is no longer that need to have the desire built 'outside' and fanned back, but rather a deferrment of that desire: if 'they' do it, they died for it; and because they died for it, I can live without it: exorcism.
Max Gillies on Parkinson: the possibility that the political body can exist in an entertainment innocence — if they laugh at it then it must be 'separate', an ironical entity. At the same time, nothing could be more like Gillies than Hawke himself.
cf. Jenni Hewitt in the Sydney Morning Herald, July 20, 1983: 'Can the image of a space hero beat that of an actor who knows his presidential lines so well? Maybe people would prefer him to stay a mannequin — perfect as he is'.
The feeling, on the Hawke-Gillies Parkinson show must surely have been reciprocal. Not only for appearance-on-TV's-sake, but also for Lear-esque overtones: in the run-up to the dumping of Mick Young, the performer has to provide a scapegoat but at the same time uplift the fool that will make this sacrifice possible. The fool is the guarantee — not that the king ('Little Caesar') will not be less than a king but that the fool will be less of a fool — an entertainer on par with the Great Entertainer (not the show host, but the main guest — Hawke himself). There are other bodies to burn, and the fool is left to endure, the bit Schlemihl for the moment. So Goneril says:
Not only, sir, this your all- licens'd fool, But other of your insolent retinue
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Do hourly carp and quarrel, breaking forth In rank and not-to-be-endured riots.
Shakespeare, King Lear, I, iv, 220-3.
On Hawke's appearance on Parkinson, Gillies is asked how he chose his Victims'; he denies that they are victims. In the later Parkinson scene with Neville and Jill Wran, Parky asks (in reference to Wran's upcoming action against the ABC) whether Wran should be 'magnanimous in victory'. The schlemihl is a complex category: a figure that shrugs and shrugs. Eternally 'cast' as victim, the schlemihl both shucks off the shadow and 'casts' it, glad of its shade, but fearful of its other meaning, the 'shade' or ghost that pursues it. The fool is there to be dispensed with, or created. But there is also the risk that, having done with the ghost, the revenant will (literally) 'come back'. The 'phantasmagoria' that Marx pointed at as of 1848 (the 'appalling parasitic body') is none other than the 'State' itself: the 'State' being not (only) the instruments of government but, in a primary sense, the entertainment aspect of government: 'government' as precisely the degree to which it manages (or is congruent with) the degree to which government accords with its own potentiality of media presentation. So: re-presentation turns out to be a bit silly: calculations upon media and history govern the outcome of what the media presents and what 'history' can say happens (Manning Clark's 'appearances' at the Combe Royal Commission being rigorously documented). A ghost's fate is not to be envied ('spooks' are what ASIO's mob are called). To be one of the 'phantasmagoria' is different: it is to be one of the 'born agains', the theatrical resurrectionists who appear (1848-style) alongside the self-effacing Bonapart-ist pretenders, clad in their garments but at the same time swathed in their shrouds, the generation to which Marx (1962: 283) referred in citing those other clowns of 1848:
Alongside decayed roues with dubious means of subsistence and dubious origins, alongside ruined and reckless casts of the bourgeoisie, were vagabonds, discharged soldiers, discharged jailbirds, escaped gallery-slaves, swindlers, imposters, lazzeroni, pickpockets, bam-boozlers, gamblers, maquereaux, brothel-keepers, porters, literary hacks, organ-grinders, ragpickers, knife-grinders, tinkers, beggars...
Parkinson's introduction to the Hawke/Gillies appearance focussed on a prime category of this sort of ghost — the barrister. Did the recent outbreak of legal action in the Royal Commissions solve the employment situation by seeming to bring to public focus (not to mention mega-fortunes) the sub-race of those called the bar? Was the Hawke Government a miraculous entity, along the lines of the Breaking of the Drought (a plausible thought this one — had not dogs been heard to bay in Wilcannia when the rain came — they being too young to have seen rain — and had not kangaroos in S.W. Queensland been seen to impale themselves on dingo fences in response to
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the gathering storm-clouds?)? Parkinson pursued the action — was not the election a weird Australian event along the lines of all of these? After all, 'top politicians become superstars': ('they get closeups, zooms, action replays'. The test, however, is 'how they stand up to imitation').
In October 1983, the group called HEAD stole the Hawke 'image', a $3000 bust set up at ACTU headquarters in Melbourne. Subsequently (J. Paul Getty Jr images and Moro images are active here) a photograph — and this is very different from the 'sports-credibility' images of Hawke in the Americas Cup outcome, or the VFL final or Union football images in which Hawke actively 'creates' himself — appeared on the front page of The Sydney Morning Herald (22.10.85). The photographic image is like the famous death-mask of Beethoven: assuring for itself only the most mythical life for its representee. The 'bust' death mask shows Hawke less one ear and the text went on to 'quote' Mr Hawke as saying: 'I have learnt to implement the wishes of voters and from now on, I will keep my ear firmly to the ground'. The message from the Central Committee of Swinging Voters was:
Bob has not got the blow-torch yet Proof that he was alive and well (minus one ear) at this date is enclosed.
The news release was accompanied by a photograph that showed the Hawke effigy with a copy of The Age superimposed. Will Max Gillies, in the name of art, cut off an ear? Will Patrick Cook adorn the Hawke effigy that Hawke-Sisyphus drags around in the cartoons? Humunculus-Hawkes' self-simulatory powers (busts, pedestals, clown-lookalikes, T-shirts etc.) produce an image of a body contracting and retracting, a Hawke which, in its images is literally worn on other bodies. Parkinson's question on Parkinson in Australia ('which is the 'real' Bob Hawke?) is as much Parky's own as Hawke's own as our own. Will the real 'us' stand up?
Noel Sanders teaches at the NSW Institute of Technology
65 Aust .J. Cultural Studies, 2:1 (1984)
References
Barthes, R. (1977) 'A Lesson in Writing', in Image/Music/Text, S. Heath,
trans., London, Fontana.
Baudrillard, J. (1981) 'Le Reste' in Simulacres et Simulation, Edition 5, Galik von Chamisso, A. (1970) Peter Schlemihl, London, Calder and Boyars.
Marx, K. (1962) The Eighteenth Brumaire of Napoleon Bonaparte', Selected Works, Vol.1, London, Foreign Languages Publishing.
Mehlmann, J. (1977) Revolution and Repetition: Marx/Hugo/Balzac, University of California Press.
Michel Serres, M. (1980) Le Parasite, Paris, Grasset, 1980, p.7.
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