Perhaps I now need to go back to context. (Colonialism demands context.)

The context is still fires and the Australian landscape even if I appear
to have strayed from that. I am still reading _The UTS Review_ , May
1997, with the heading of the Postmodern University. This heading is a
type of joke or perhaps a parody where the heading comes crashing down.
Those gathered together in this journal of  some 282 pages I consider to
be friends. It was edited by Stephen Muecke and Meaghan Morris, and the
names on the advisory committee and editorial board as well as the
writers include Ghassan Hage, Marcia Langton, Amanda Lohrey, Anna Gibbs,
Maria Angels, Brian Massumi, just to give a random selection as my eye
passes down the list. I would expect a lively and interesting journal
just from the editors alone. (Some may say I am biased being a UTS
graduate. But what do I  need care.) I would be surprised if this
journal blips brightly on the World academic radar.

Kant taught his students to mistrust their synthetic apriori judgments
in his method of criticism. In the historical context this was addressed
to a lecture hall full of ruling class boys with an average age of 16.
Kant did not consider women capable of reasoned intellect although he
did consider women capable of the sublime and aesthetics. Also, note the
colonialist assumption in this context. In a sense, what Kant teaches is
to mistrust the assumptions made through the empirical experiences of
living. As Ian Hunter who I am reading from the journal explains; this
lecture hall of boys is being initiated into an awe-inspiring mystery,
having to suspend empirical reality as they have experienced it. This
turns the intellect from the outside world into the self cultivating a
type of self in which these boys are to become bearers of a
world-creating intellect.

This is a rite of passage for ruling class boys who can grow up to be
ruling class men who can say; I am the world. Kant understands synthesis
as the synthesis of difference under unity. This allows the synthesis of
the interior self with the outside world to produce a colonialist
perspective and judgment in the world, not just by the ruling class, but
with universal education at later historical stages the middle and
working classes as well who come to share this colonial world view, at
least in colonialist or imperialist nations such as Australia, the UK
and the USA and also Western Europe. (This can be seen to be repeated by
Lacan's mirror phase where the I as the self mirrors the world, also.)

To go back to the universities. This teaching of Kant's also allows an
ideal model of the university as the University of Ideal Reason in a
historical context which may carry the names of Oxbridge and Harvard. To
project this image of the university onto all universities in the world
is to project a colonialist ideal. Can it be said that a university in
Mexico is actually a projection of an ideal Oxford image without making
a colonialist assumption? Can the same even be said for Curtin
University of Technology on the outskirts of Perth where Jon Stratton
teaches and who gave me the ideas about the sublime using Whiteley's
paintings as an example? (Can it even be said that Oxford and Harvard
actually adhere to the ideal model whose names they carry?)

When I was editor of _User News_ as part of the fight against HIV/AIDS I
worked with a graduate in creative writing from Curtin who was taught by
Jon Stratton. She wrote these amazing and very funny short stories for
the magazine on top of her job as a peer educator in the injecting drug
user area. She read the magazine and picked up straight away the
editorial style and design, which was informed by some heavy sounding
names which included Deleuze, even if these names were not emblazoned
across the masthead. These stories required no editorial intervention
from me and were very much needed to make the magazine work effectively.
The type of pedagody which Jon Stratton demonstrates is a relation
between student and teacher which produces difference and goes on
producing difference, as was required for _Users News_ and this is how I
also read the Brett Whiteley article. It is a generous pedagogy which
offers a gift without a debt relation. This is also why in this writing
of Jon Stratton's I was able to very quickly get what I needed from the
article. I have nothing to forgive the journal for, nor do I need
justify my differences.

I do forgive Kant. To forgive Kant like this in the Neitzschean sense of
noble virtues also implies a violent refusal. In forgiving Kant I
realise that I am involved in violating Kant with a destructive critique.

I have not directly addressed the problem of the self or the I in terms
of the Australian landscape and  sublime fires and completed the
critique of the colonial sublime landscape  but clues are already there
in the discussion of the university. The context I am also working with
is that of HIV/AIDS and what I call Queer Aesthetics which is something
I have been writing on and off for a dozen or more years now. (Queer
Aesthetics has nothing to do with Bulterite queery theory, I should add.
Butler needs to be forgiven.)


best wishes (and there is a goddess who is the perfect philosopher)

Chris Jones.