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Vanguards and Avant-Gardes: The 'Reason in Revolt' Online Project on Political and Cultural Radicalism

The Past is Before Us; Proceedings of the Ninth National Labour History Conference
(Sydney: Australian Society for the Study of Labour History, 2005)

Simon Booth, Verity Burgmann, Stuart Macintyre, Andrew Milner and Matthew Ryan

• The point of the project
• Background to the project: from filing cabinets to computer technology
• What is Being Done: the Technical Aspects of the Project
• What Is To Be Done?

The 'Reason in Revolt' project aims to bring together primary source documents of Australian radicalism as a readily accessible digitised resource. By 'radical' we refer to those who aimed to make society more equal and to emancipate the exploited or oppressed. As it grows and develops, the project website will become an expanding record of the movements, institutions, venues and publications through which radicals sought to influence Australian society. Burgmann, Macintyre and Milner intend to utilise the technological benefits of this website in the production of a monograph on the role of intellectuals in the development of radical thought and practice.

To the predictable annoyance of Andrew Bolt, the Australian Research Council is providing $222,000 over the 2004-2006 period to fund a project entitled 'Reason in Revolt: The Role of Intellectuals in Australian Radicalism.' Writing in the Melbourne Herald Sun in November 2003, Bolt airily dismissed the project's three Chief Investigators, Verity Burgmann, Stuart Macintyre and Andrew Milner, as 'old-time Marxists'. Doubtless, he will be relieved to learn that we have drawn on a younger generation of radicals to provide our research assistants: Simon Booth, completing his History PhD with Macintyre on 'Picturing Politics: Cartoons and Melbourne's Left, 1890-1920' and located in the project office near Burgmann in the Department of Political Science at the University of Melbourne; and Matthew Ryan, one of the editors of Arena Magazine, who is based with Milner in the Centre for Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies at Monash University.

Over the next few years this team will build an online database of the more significant primary source documents of Australian radicalism during the past 130 years. Booth coordinates the uploading, indexing and cross-referencing of the more broadly 'political' documents, Ryan the more specifically 'cultural' documents. The launch of the website www.reasoninrevolt.net.au at the Biennial Conference of the Australian Society for the Study of Labour History at the University of Sydney 30 June - 2 July 2005 now marks the successful completion of the first stage of this online project.

The point of the project

The 'Reason in Revolt' project aims to bring together primary source documents of Australian radicalism as a readily accessible and easy-to-use digitised resource. Improved scanning techniques make possible the high-quality website reproduction of hardcopy texts. Most importantly, the benefits of online technology will facilitate new ways of understanding and interpreting Australian political and cultural radicalism. The Chief Investigators encourage others to exploit the possibilities; and intend themselves to utilise online technology in the production of a monograph on the role of intellectuals in the development of radical thought and practice.

By 'intellectual', we refer not to a certain type of person, but rather to a particular type of social role: to writers and journalists, actors and painters, priests and teachers, no matter what their own individual levels of 'intelligence', no matter what their own particular individual abilities and disabilities. This social role is reflection, analysis, commentary on and critical engagement with the institutions and practices that constitute the social order. [1] Some of these will be 'traditional' intellectuals, to borrow Gramsci's term, that is, professional intellectuals who experience their social position as 'autonomous and independent'; some will be 'organic' to other social groups, such as the 'bourgeoisie' or the 'working class'. [2] The prime focus of this project is on those who disseminated radical argument in the public domain, usually in printed form, whether they operated as 'traditional' or 'organic' intellectuals and whether they produced their statements as individuals or as groups.

By 'radical' we do not mean those who simply made statements that unsettled or destabilised prevailing ideas; we refer rather to those who aimed to make society more equal and to emancipate the exploited or oppressed. To this extent our definition of radical is approximate to 'left' in the sense used by Norberto Bobbio, who maintains that 'the left tends towards equality and the right tends towards inequality'. [3] Whatever their immediate success, the radical intellectual currents, movements and organisations with which we are concerned, significantly affected the history of Australia in ways that enlarged rather than restricted opportunities and improved rather than deteriorated people's circumstances. In many instances the radical heresies of one generation became the commonplace or at least more mainstream attitudes of later generations, for example: the late nineteenth-century demands for the enfranchisement of women; or the early to mid-twentieth century arguments for equal pay for equal work, regardless of gender or race.

A recurring motif in 'modernist' political and cultural practice, from the late nineteenth-century until well into the second half of the twentieth, has been that of the 'progressive intellectual', understood either as political 'vanguard' or cultural 'avant-garde'. More expressly 'postmodernist' accounts often argue that such practices became obsolete during the late twentieth century. We propose to examine the modernist self-perceptions of the progressive intellectual and to analyse the extent to which these persist into the postmodern period. Postmodernist readings tend to subject vanguardist or avant-gardist intellectuals to what E.P. Thompson once termed 'the enormous condescension of posterity'. [4] More explicitly hostile readings, on the other hand, follow the movement of such intellectuals into the universities and cultural professions, to characterise them as a deracinated intellectual 'elite' removed from and unsympathetic to popular values and aspirations. [5] By contrast, we aim to interrogate progressive intellectuals' own accounts of themselves, their declared motivations and aspirations, through a direct analysis of a wide range of primary source texts. We aim, too, to discover the extent to which such radical cultures constitute what Raymond Williams termed 'a whole way of life'. [6]

The title 'Reason in Revolt' is not simply an allusion to the words of the well-known revolutionary anthem, but also an indication that we intend to investigate how radical intellectuals tended to subscribe to an alternative rationality to the dominant or hegemonic; and how this commitment to 'reason', however understood, tended to underpin their urge to revolt. For example, socialist intellectuals frequently argued that collectivity and co-operation were more reasonable organisational principles for society than individualism and competition; and feminist intellectuals counterposed the rationality of equality between the sexes to the irrationality of women's subordination to men. In positing this notion of an alternative rationality, the research team will nonetheless seek to problematise the Enlightenment assumption, common to such intellectual radicalism, that the application of reason to human social arrangements results in 'progress'. We will therefore consider whether postmodernist critiques of the grand narratives of emancipation spawned by the Enlightenment - such as socialism, feminism and nationalism - offer insight into the particular role and manner of operation of radical intellectuals.

There is growing interest in the study of the role of intellectuals in Australian radicalism. The 1988 collection edited by Head and Walters contained several essays considering such subjects within a framework that explored the historical relationship between intellectuals and Australian society. There is a growing body of biographical studies of particular labour movement intellectuals, including Vere Gordon Childe, Brian Fitzpatrick and Lloyd Ross; and Irving and Scalmer have recently attempted to conceptualise the role of 'Australian labour intellectuals'. [7] Feminism, peace activism, environmentalism and Aboriginal activism have also generated biographical and other historical studies of intellectual practice, for example those in Eric Fry's edited collection Rebels and Radicals. [8] More recently, Janette M. Bomford's That Dangerous and Persuasive Woman. Vida Goldstein, Peter Hempenstall's The Meddlesome Priest: A Life of Ernest Burgmann, Tim Rowse's Nugget Coombs: A Reforming Life and Paul Strangio's Keeper of the Faith: A Biography of Jim Cairns, have all explored the problematic relationships between radical intellectuals and their social milieux. [9]

The 'Reason in Revolt' project will chart the constellation of Australian radicalism over more than a century, so as to make possible a more systematic and comparative study of patterns of intellectual practice. Political science and political history have contributed many worthwhile studies of particular streams of progressive thought and practice. [10] However, the bulk of the existing secondary literature is polarised between political accounts of the left, which are inattentive to its intellectual context, and intellectual histories inattentive to politics. Much left-wing history is preoccupied with expressly political purposes and uninterested in reading the relevant political primary sources as cultural texts; whilst the more recent focus on literary and cultural history tends to be concerned with particular groups and genres, to the expense of broader left history. We aim, therefore, to integrate the approaches of political science and political history, on the one hand, literary and cultural studies, on the other, into a synthetic treatment of Australian intellectual radicalism.

There has been no previous analysis of Australian radicalism as a whole and over a long time period. Our aim is to reveal the extent to which different radical ideas and practices both intersected and took issue with each other. These conjunctures and disjunctures will need to be examined if radicalism is to be adequately comprehended and this can only be done through a totalising approach.

The website will enable researchers to test hypotheses about transmission, influences, shifts, and breaks; about languages, imagery and audiences. Examples of the questions that could be asked include: to what extent has left-wing thought and practice employed masculinist rhetoric? or feminist thought and practice been impervious to issues of class? to what degree has the productivism of socialist thought precluded its engagement with environmental issues? is there a connection between realist aesthetics and leftist politics, modernist aesthetics and political quietism? Hitherto, scholars seeking answers to these and related questions have been denied the advantages of a computerised database with cross-referencing and keyword search functions. The provision of keyword search functions will enable researchers to explore, for example, continuities and discontinuities in language use between different kinds of radicalism or between different radical generations. Downloadable text and graphics will facilitate comparative analysis of analogous continuities and discontinuities in patterns of iconography. At the very least, the accessibility of the documents and the ease with which they can be manipulated will encourage multiple forms of investigation and critical scrutiny.

Background to the project: from filing cabinets to computer technology

The project inherited a large archive. With the help of a large ARC grant of $33,000 in 1990-1991, which employed Joy Damousi as a half-time research assistant, Burgmann and Milner established a primary source collection comprising approximately 2,000 documents. Significant pamphlets and manifestos, influential poems and songs, important editorials and articles from journals and magazines, were photocopied from a wide range of collections located at: the National Library of Australia and the Noel Butlin Archives of Business and Labour in Canberra; the State Library of Victoria and the University of Melbourne Archives; the Mitchell Library of the State Library of New South Wales; the Barr Smith Library and the South Australian Archives in Adelaide; the Battye Library in Perth; the Oxley Library in Brisbane; and from private collections. Attention was also paid to pictorial material, such as illustrations, photographs, posters and cartoons. Various autobiographical writings were also collected.

The existing hardcopy database currently fills a four-drawer filing cabinet. It includes obscure, even hitherto unknown material, but also obviously important radical utterances that are nonetheless difficult to locate or are scattered in secondary literature and rarely reproduced in toto. Examples of 'obvious' inclusions are: the Manifesto of the Democratic Association of Victoria in 1872 (the Australian affiliate to Karl Marx's 'First International' or International Working Men's Association); William Lane's exhortation to fellow radicals to leave Australia and join his utopian socialist community in Paraguay in 1893; Vida Goldstein's feminist manifestos during her early twentieth-century Senate election campaigns; the Victorian Socialist Party Socialist Sunday School's 'Ten Commandments'; the Industrial Workers of the World's song, 'Bump Me Into Parliament'; the founding manifestos of the Communist Party of Australia in 1920; the statements of the Unemployed Workers Movement in the Great Depression of the early 1930s; Nettie Palmer's response to the Spanish Civil War; statements of Aboriginal activists at the time of the 1938 sesquicentenary of European settlement; extracts from P.R. Stephensen's The Foundations of Culture in Australia and Rex Ingamells's Conditional Culture; manifestos of the New Theatre, the Realist Writers' Groups and the Studio of Realist Art; A.A. Phillips on the cultural cringe; founding or other significant editorials of periodicals such as The Bulletin, Ross's Monthly of Protest, Personality and Progress, Communist Review, Meanjin, Overland, Outlook, Arena, Intervention, Refractory Girl, Scarlet Woman and Hecate, and of newspapers such as The Radical, The Boomerang, Dawn, Woman Voter, The Guardian, Tribune, Mejane, Abo Call and Koorakookoo; documents relating to the major splits in the Communist Party; the principal statements of the New South Wales Builders Labourers' Federation during the 'Green Bans' of 1971-75; the election manifesto of the Nuclear Disarmament Party in 1984; the aims and objectives of the Aboriginal Treaty 88 Campaign; the Charter of the Rainbow Alliance in 1989; and the Preamble and Objectives of the Constitution of the New Left Party in 1990.

This inherited collection is a sizeable and representative database of primary source materials, produced individually or collectively by radical intellectuals and relating to self-consciously 'progressive' currents in Australian political life. Despite overtures to various publishers and some near bites in the early 1990s, the earlier project fell victim to the technological advances it has now embraced. The time was out of joint for hardcopy publication of documentary collections such as those that informed the research of previous generations of labour historians. [11]

Fortunately, the new wave of funding will enable the research team to consolidate and expand the collection, especially for the 1990s period not included in the initial project, and to incorporate the most worthwhile components of the enlarged collection into a website. This will itself constitute a significant research project into the forms and provenance of Australian political and cultural radicalism. More importantly, however, the new technology will allow the texts to be investigated in innovative and fruitful ways.

What is Being Done: the Technical Aspects of the Project

Selecting Documents

Documents are being selected initially from the inherited database. The criterion for a document to be included is simply that it is an expression of the work of radical intellectuals, broadly conceived. A radical is here understood as someone who wants to transform society in a more egalitarian and emancipatory direction, an expression as anything from a speech or lecture through to the rules and purposes of an organisation. If anyone wishes to offer documents for inclusion, or at least to establish whether or not the project already has a particular item, please contact Simon Booth on booth@unimelb.ed.au in the case of 'political' documents or Matthew Ryan at Matthew.Ryan@arts.monash.edu.au in the case of 'cultural' documents.

The original hardcopy collection was biased towards documents of an expressly political kind, so current attention is being directed toward the addition of material concerning cultural radicalism. Documents included thus far have ranged from journal articles on national culture and debates about aesthetics to novel extracts and theatre programs. Organisational material, such as the constitutions of writers' groups, has also been included. Along with printed text, images of cartoons and photographs are also included in the collection. The use of MP3 sound files has also enabled the inclusion of radical songs and music. This broad scope approach to culture will enable the user to view radical critical work as well as cultural artefacts themselves.

Scanning documents

The project as originally envisaged proposed to digitise all our documents using text recognition software. This form of scanning digitises the document character by character, producing a word document with all the text in it. The great strength of this approach is that it allows complete flexibility in searching. Once the scanning process is complete, it is possible to search the document for any text it contains. The difficulty, however, is the imperfection of the text recognition software. As anyone who deals with archival material knows, the quality of the original document is often poor or has deteriorated over time. While text recognition software is perfectly adequate to deal with a document printed off a modern laser printer to today's standards, it has serious problems with the printout off a microfilm of a newspaper typeset 100 years ago. Initial trials with this approach found that, while the search options provided by a document with full text-recognition were to be preferred, the time taken to correct errors made the approach unviable in most instances. In some cases, it was quicker to type a transcript than to scan the document and make all the required corrections.

As an alternative, we decided to scan all the documents as images, but to also provide a text transcription only when we have determined that a document is of special importance. The standard adopted is to scan the originals as PDF documents, that is, the common standard on the web: most computers have a PDF reader and most users have some experience with PDFs.

Importantly, Booth and Ryan are writing brief abstracts for each document, thus ensuring keyword search functions for each abstract if not every document in its entirety. These abstracts will be particularly valuable in the case of visual and audio sources, as well as for those documents uploaded only in PDF format.

As we noted, a number of the documents are either in a poor physical state or badly reproduced. This raises the question of whether to include a document in the database at all if it is in such poor condition. Here, we opted for the principle of inclusivity: if the bulk of the material in a document is readable, even if with difficulty, then it has been included, since it will still be of some value to users of the website. Where a document is of poor quality, this will be noted in its entry in the database.

Coding and the Online Heritage Resource Manager

We aim to provide 'context' for each 'text' in the form of a brief commentary, and any necessary annotation, though this aspiration has been jeopardised by the fact that the ARC did not grant teaching relief for the project. In these circumstances, we would very much welcome assistance in writing commentaries, and annotation where necessary, from anyone especially familiar with selected documents; and by-lines would be provided.

At the very least, an elaborate coding system is being deployed as each document is placed on the website. The Australian Science and Technology Heritage Centre (AUSTEHC) has developed a platform called an Online Heritage Resource Manager (OHRM), which they describe as a 'context based resource discovery and access system that links creators, archival and heritage resources and published materials within the one system.' [12] For the purposes of this project, it provides a database in which the source material can be organised and which generates the bulk of the website automatically. The OHRM was selected as the appropriate platform because of its demonstrated success in a range of other projects, including the Australian Trade Union Archives project [13] and the Australian Women's Archives Project [14] as well as the Australian Dictionary of Biography Online.

The OHRM is a database which employs the 'entity-relationship' model for documenting and managing resources. In this approach, the creation of descriptive entities and the establishment of their interrelationships place records in their context. [15] For example, William Guthrie Spence's book, The Ethics of New Unionism, is described by its primary relationship to the subject entity 'New unionism', the biographical entity 'William Guthrie Spence' and the institutional entity 'Australian Socialist League'. Since Spence has an ongoing relationship with the ALP, there is also a 'see also' relation to the institutional entity 'Australian Labor Party'. Each of these entities has a description, which provides the user with some context, and also links to the entries for each individual PDFdocument.

The original archive was catalogued into sections such as feminism, radical nationalism, republicanism, indigenous rights, homosexual liberation, pacifism, anti-militarism, environmentalism, socialism, anarchism, communism, realism, modernism, postmodernism, right-to-work campaigns, student movements, libertarianism, free thought; where appropriate, these sections are further subdivided into manageable chronological or other subdivisions, such as '1920s' or 'New Left'.

In the OHRM each of these subject headings become entities. They are then related to other entities, which are organised under the categories: Events, Institutions, Persons, Places, Subjects and Cultural Forms. Entities are also listed under the additional browsing category of 'functions', which includes headings such as Activist, Social Phenomenon, Political Movement and Aesthetic Philosophy. For example, the Subject entity 'Divorce' is related to another entity, 'Feminism', as well as listed under the function of Social Phenomenon. The documents are then entered into the database as 'publications for download'. These are then also related to the appropriate entities - a process which builds a complex map of the relationship between the people, the organisations and the events of Australian radicalism.

There are some challenges in the relating process. For example, the subject entity 'anti-Semitism' is used when a document's subject is anti-Semitism. What, then, when one comes across an example of anti-Semitism in a document whose subject is something quite different, for example, socialism in Sydney? The OHRM provides the option of establishing a relationship as either 'primary' or 'see-also', which is one useful way to indicate the relative importance of the relationship established. The approach adopted when dealing with this type of problem is to concentrate on what is most useful for the user. This generally means including a relationship which is slightly doubtful at the 'see also' level, but then explaining its inclusion in the abstract field in the document's description - thus indicating that the article on socialism in Sydney exhibits two moments of anti-Semitism.

As suggested in the examples of included documents, our understanding of 'culture' incorporates both the artistic sense of creative production and the sociological sense of a 'whole way of life'. So a journal article that presents an argument for aesthetic realism, for example, would be primarily related to the subject entity 'Realism' and would also be related to the cultural form entity of 'Criticism'. An essay on the need to forge a distinctive Australian identity would be primarily related to 'Nationalism'. Where there is an explicit discussion of culture, using the term in the either the sociological or artistic sense, a primary relation to the 'Culture' entity would be made. In the case of artistic cultural artefacts, such as poetry, a relation to the cultural form entity 'Poetry' would be used. Other examples of sub-categories listed under cultural forms include Paintings, Songs and Cartoons. Arranging these sets of related categories around culture means that the user will be able to gain access to a large network of documents concerning culture, whether they are researching radical approaches to culture or radical cultural artefacts.

Copyright

The copyright held over documents is an important issue for this project, presenting a number of challenges. Where copyright exists in an item to be included in the website, permission must be sought. Until recently, copyright for the vast majority of the material lasted for the life of the author plus 50 years from the end of the year of the author's death. On 1 January 2005, the free-trade agreement between Australia and the United States of America came into effect, changing the duration of copyright from 50 to 70 years from the death of the author. However, there is no revival of copyright that expired before 1 January 2005. For example, David Stewart, a key figure in the founding of Workers' Education Associations in Australia, died in 1954 and copyright in his published work ended at the end of 2004. His published works came into the public domain on 1 January 2005 and, since they were already out of copyright at the beginning of the year, they will remain so regardless of the free-trade agreement. [16]

Thus far, the bulk of material processed for the project has been from the nineteenth century and in the public domain, but in moving forward to the twentieth century the process of seeking copyright permission will become more demanding. It can be very difficult to track down copyright holders who were members of small radical organisations or marginalised social groups. Also, in some cases it is unclear who would hold the copyright, as for example in flyers or pamphlets issued around particular campaigns or issues, or material published under pseudonyms. As the project expands its cultural content there will also be additional copyright hurdles. Unpublished literary, dramatic and musical works, as well as unpublished anonymous material never come out of copyright into the public domain, and it is often impossible to find copyright holders for this material.

The process undertaken in relation to copyright is set out in the diagram below. The OHRM has been designed to include a statement on the copyright status with the entry for each document. This is used to track the status of a document and to record what steps have been made to identity the copyright holder and seek permission to include a document. The keeping of proper records is essential should an audit occur or a complaint be lodged in order to demonstrate that best endeavours have been made to gain permission for the use of any material under copyright.

Where a document is in copyright and the author agrees to its inclusion, a deed has been prepared by lawyers, which gives permission for the document to be used on the site. As the diagram demonstrates, where the copyright holder cannot be identified, we have decided to include the material. Subsequently, should someone approach us and demonstrate they hold the copyright and do not wish the material included, then it will be removed immediately. Additionally, if we cannot through our best endeavours locate a copyright holder we have identified and the material has already been in the public domain, then we will include it, and similarly remove it if requested. Where material is unpublished, private material, never before made public, then we will not include it. Are there other issues of intellectual property? Our understanding is that copyright and associated moral rights are the major issue and not intellectual property (ideas formally registered for commercial exploitation). However, we will seek advice on the matter of intellectual property.

What Is To Be Done?

For our purposes, the website will constitute the primary resource for writing a monograph on the role of intellectuals in Australian radicalism over the past 130 years. This monograph will provide taxonomical analysis of the components of radical thought and practice, thereby mapping the changing boundaries of radicalism. It will explore how radicals conceptualised their objectives to include and exclude particular components such as race, gender and nature, and will suggest some of the principal shifts within radical ideology. The monograph will pay attention to the textual dimension, looking at discursive and iconographic forms, breaks and continuities. It will provide a contextual interpretation of the organisational forms and practices of radical political movements, their reach and impact. Finally, it will provide an historical and analytical account of the figure of the radical intellectual: who s/he was and how s/he worked.

However, the success of the project will also be judged by the extent to which it proves interesting and useful for others. As it grows and develops, the website should increasingly capture the variety of radical passions and persuasions that have motivated large numbers of Australians over the past 130 years; and become an expanding record of the movements, institutions, venues and publications through which these people sought to influence the wider society. The use of digital scanning technology, a relational database and the internet will allow much greater access to this body of radical intellectual expression. We hope that the website will provide both scholars and radicals with a valuable and accessible resource.

Except where otherwise noted, content on this site is
licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Australia License