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By Ann Hardy
Illusions Magazine: A NZ magazine
of critical writing on the visual and performing arts,
Issue 20, Summer 1992, Editor Lawrence McDonald (Wordwars
I Suburbia pp3-9, December 1992, The Imaginary Partnership,
Wellington).
The opening shot of Gaylene Preston
and Graeme Tetley’s
1990 movie Ruby and Rata has much in common with one
of Peter Siddell’s panoramas of suburban Auckland.
The
landforms in both are gentle, the houses rendered in
sharp perfection like treasures offered to the viewer
on a green background of jeweller’s cloth. Golden
light suffuses the landscapes, although in the paintings,
when you look harder, the light seems to be generated,
uncannily, from inside the houses themselves.
It’s
a beautiful view … beautiful, ordered,
idealised and frighteningly empty of human presence.
The longer you look the more you’re aware of
what’s
missing; the brawling, conflicted, messy, noisy nature
of everyday life.
Although the narrative trajectory
of Ruby and Rata soon plunges into such everyday battles,
this initial
hesitation
before it does so is memorable, establishing, as a
fantasy and reference-point, an image of the sustainable
perfection
of suburban life. Then, as the camera moves in and
down, this pristine landscape produces human proof
of its durability
in the shape of 83year-old Ruby humbering off (in a
beautifully preserved Singer Gazelle) to meet the Law
for her over-seventies
driving test.
But when Ruby fails the test and consequently
can travel no further than she can walk, her few hundred
metres
of this pleasant suburb begins to seem like a prison
without walls. Effectively confined to her home,
and obviously not prepared to stoop to catching a bus,
especially if it takes her to the Sunset Villas Retirement
Home,
where everybody else thinks she ought to go, she
decides
she needs a tenant who can provide back-up services
and the possibility of respectful companionship.
Instead
she ends up with Rata, who looks like a sophisticated
businesswoman but is actually the natural enemy
of suburban peace in disguise: an itinerant solo mother
with an inner-city
life style, a job as a cleaner and a sideline in
welfare fraud.
When Rata begins to live out her
dream
of being
a rock singer and starts holding band-practices
in the basement, war is declared between the two women,
beginning
a series of comic yet increasingly risky acts
of aggression and revenge, which are ended only by
Ruby’s
physical collapse and by the uniting force of
the love the two
women share for Rata’s young son, Willy.
As
a story about a clash between people with different
social values, the film is often very
funny, it
looks great and has a exceptionally supportive
musical
score. Like Gaylene Preston’s previous
film Mr Wrong it makes the uncommon assumption
that ordinary people, in
particular ordinary women, are interesting and
that what happens to them matters. It has been
accepted by critics
around the world as an unpretentious, successful
comedy and reviewed with appreciative comments
such as “a
witty, gracefully shaped romp about race and
the generation gap” “a tough-minded
unsenti-mental film of great charm” and “a
wonderfully warm film that challenges our preconceptions
about first
impressions” Still, when I first saw Ruby and Rata
at its Wellington premiere in 1990 my own reaction to
it was moderate enjoyment
flecked with revulsion. I remembered the lushness of
the imagery and the physical precision of Simon Barnett’s
performance as yuppie-in-training Buckle with pleasure,
but the central characters of Ruby and Rata were selfishly
manipulative to a degree that really discomforted me,
despite the style and charm of the performances of Yvonne
Lawley and Vanessa Rare. Their gutsy resourcefulness
seemed to cover up for emotional coldness and the ‘light
and amusing’ nature of comedy hid some pretty big
icebergs; it was difficult to enjoy the antics of a bunch
of characters who were all on the make to the extent
that they were still trying to do deals and sign contracts
when one of them was at death’s door.
Puzzled, I
parcelled the film away as being a rather peculiar
hybrid: a “golden” rather than a “black” comedy,
but with indications of something nasty hidden in its
luxuriance … like the bugs and corruption which
inhabit the vegetable and corporeal plenty of some
of Peter Greenaway’s films, or the sterility
that haunts Peter Siddell’s paintings.
However,
that was two years ago now, and a lot can happen in
two years. Since the time Ruby and Rata was
made the
yuppie life-style it lampoons has lost the force of
self-confidence Social Welfare cuts, rising unemployment
rates and the
radical revision of state housing policies have made
lying, manipulating others and stealing, essential
survival skills rather than behaviours of choice for
a sizeable
section of the population.
So nowadays, redefined by
recession, the bones of the film can look quite different,
especially to a local
audience that is aware of the human costs associated
with New Zealand’s economic restructuring.
The setting of the film may be attractive and the
violence
may be nothing more than verbal, but the battles
between Ruby and Rata are now being carried out,
in much darker
circumstances, all around the country, as those who
are “disadvantaged”,
whether because of age, race, or gender, try to get
for themselves a sufficient share of the shrinking
pool of
communal wealth.
Aking the idea
of a collective moral code seriously has been unpopular
for some time. In New Zealand,
we haven’t
needed one for the last decade largely because
of the translation of our civic energies into
the arena of economics,
where the ebb and flow of the market has become
regarded as the only relevant indicator of “need” and “reward”.
In the arts, theories of post-modernism have
also been influential in their insistence that
no hierarchical
authority/explanatory system can ultimately redeem
its
pledge to provide us with the truth about our
lives; and that therefore, any opinion about
how we should
act is, theoretically, as good as any other.
Whatever
the reason, it has been very difficult to find
anyone in this country in the last ten
years
who has
had the voice or the vocabulary to effectively
argue for an alternative, more compassionate
way of organising
our country. Perhaps we’ve done so little
to protect one another because we have consistently
underestimated
the power that language has in constructing both
our everyday realities and our representative
systems of
authority, and perhaps also because we have tended
to assume that our personal behaviours no longer
have much
connection with larger social trends.
In America
the excesses of those market-driven eighties
have been recognised as a fruitful source
of script-material
and there has been a definable group of films
coming out (starting with Wall Street in 1988
and continuing
on with movies like Working Girl, Bad Influence,
Bonfire of The Vanities, Vampire’s Kiss)
all of which expose the amoral ruthlessness of
the corporate world, and portray
protagonists either succumbing to complete moral
decay or breaking free of it and turning back
to traditional
yet still materially rewarding American values.
In
a sense then Ruby and Rata is a New Zealand
relative of these American anti-market films,
which is in
itself unusual because very few local features
recently have
managed to engage in contemporary social criticism
at the same time as telling an entertaining
story (Skin Deep, Sons For the Return Home and Mr Wrong
were earlier
exceptions). But Ruby and Rata aims for less
than the American films, by setting its story
in the
fallout zone
of suburbia rather than at the centre of power,
and also aims at much more by examining in
realistic
detail
a
set of relationships and by embodying its energies
in issues of language as much if not more than
in
images or action, it demonstrates the need
for, and points
the
way to, the possibility of a flexible, contingent
but shared moral code which could form the
basis for effective
social action.
In fact it ties in surprisingly
well with some of the issues which have been debated
in the
last few
years
amongst philosophers and theorist who are interested
in discussing the possible nature of ethical
action in this “post-modern” age.
Its hard not
to deal with everyday life in a film to some
degree, but it’s interesting to note the
extent to which Ruby and Rata is concerned with
siting its conflicts
within the realm of such common activities as
shopping, stopping to have a chat with the neighbours,
making food,
having a bath. Some of that could be set down
to a feminist consciousness organising the film
and/or to Graeme Tetley’s
remembrances of the particular circumstances
that inspired the script – he has said
parts of it are based on incidents and characters
from his childhood.
It’s also true though that the “everyday
life” which is so familiar to us that we
take it for granted, has become a rich area for
analysis, as
theorists look for evidence of value – assumptions
and the traces of power networks within mundane
patterns of action.
The most influential work
in this area is probably
Michel de Certeau’s book The Practice of
Everyday Life and this is how he defines its
aims:
‘The purpose of this work is
to make explicit the systems of operational combination … which
also compose a ‘culture,’ and to bring
to light the models of action characteristic
of users whose status as the
dominated element in society (a status that does
mean they are either passive or docile) is concealed
by the
euphemistic term ‘consumers’ … the
goal is not to make clearer how the violence
of order is transmuted into a disciplinary technology,
but rather
to bring to light the clandestine forms taken
by the dispersed, tactical and makeshift creativity
of groups
or individuals already caught in the nets of‘discipline’.
Pushed to their ideal limits, these procedures
and ruses of consumers compose the network of
an antidiscipline
which is the subject of this book.’
Michel
de Certeau is interested in “marginal” people, “consumers”,
those who seem marginal to the exercise of power,
although those on the margins, by this definition
probably compose
the majority of any population. As you can also
see, he is not interested just in the fact of
their/our domination
by greater powers … he wants to postulate
a considerable capacity for resistance and change
centred in those practices
of everyday life.
By this measure, the location
of Ruby and Rata in the suburbs becomes significant
again, from
a slightly
different point-of-view. In this film it seems
to me
that what
is missing is just as important as what’s
there, and what is missing, most of the time,
is the centre
of the city, the centre of power. We occasionally
see the office where Rata does her cleaning job
and it is
obviously a very important place, sporting the
pale colours and chilly elegance that we have
come to associate with
the heights of bureaucratic or economic power.
But when she’s there, after hours, it’s
always empty; flash chairs encircling a deserted
boardroom. Apart from
the man at Social Welfare, Rata never gets to
confront those who organise her destiny … not
that she ever expresses a clear wish to do so,
except in song.
Instead she and Ruby have to deal
with the emissaries of The System, its flunkies.
There’s
the young traffic officer who talks to her of “statutory
obligation” and says “I’m
only doing my job” when he fails her on
her driving test, despite Ruby’s heartfelt
assertion that she will die now she can’t
drive to the shops or the doctor.
The man from
Social Welfare, well, we see bits of his body
in three extended sequences before
we even
see
his face and it’s not until their fourth
and final confrontation that he is given a name,
Kevin, and even
then his new dignity is undercut as we find out
that he’s being called out to the office
Christmas party so he can play the spoons.
Even
the winsome Buckle is a substitute, a substitute
for his unseen father, who is clearly the real
source of all material benefits. Buckle may have
great aspirations
to power (he wants a BMW by the time he’s
25 and a low-angle shot catches him draped over
a chair like
an indolent princeling) but he doesn’t
have the real thing yet, which is one of the
reasons why the pragmatic
Rata soon gives him the push from her bed.
At
the nightclub, in the climatic episode of the
film, “real” power
comes quite close in the person of Morgan Cohen
the producer who might give the band its big
break in the music scene … except
that, in a sequence of considerable visual wit,
we see him only from a distance and he walks
out after a few
minutes, never having connected with the main
characters at all.
So that leaves us with Ruby,
Rata and Willie, as objects of interest and characters
with the
ability
to develop.
They are marginal people, marginal because of
their age (young or old) and their social and
economic
status, as well as because of the place where
they live … the
suburbs, which are symbolically on the margins
of power as represented by the image of the city.
However,
even here the playing field is by no means level.
Ruby is a property owner and by
the look
of her house,
a woman of means. If it weren’t for her
failing health, she would be quite capable of
remaining self-sufficient.
Rata, on the other hand, hasn’t had “an
address” for
some time and even after she manages to install
herself as Ruby’s tenant, Ruby is way “above” her,
both literally and in terms of social class.
Although
the reality of the degree of disparity in living
standards
in this country is camouflaged by setting the
film not in the marginal “margins” of
one of our cities, say Wainuiomata or Manukau,
but in a comfortable inner
suburb, the basic pattern of social advantage
through material possession is still intact and
visible, with
Ruby occupying a power-position analogous to
those of the unseen males whose absence partly
structures the
film.
Do they then, marginalised to different
degrees, display what Michel de Certeau calls “dispersed,
tactical and makeshift creativity?” Well,
yes, that does seem a more interesting way of
looking at the behaviour
which I had previously found so unappealing.
In discussing the kind of behaviour which is
known as “instrumental”,
in that it is designed to achieve benefits in
the spheres of status or material welfare, de
Certeau writes of the
difference between “tactics” and “strategies”.
“Strategies” are the actions of those who have the
luxury of a stable power base:
“Strategies … the
calculation or manipulation of power relationships
that becomes possible
as
soon as a subject with will and power can be isolated. It postulates
a place that can be defined as its own and relations
with an exteriority can be undertaken from this
place.”
By contrast the word “tactic” describes the
actions of those, who like Rata and Willie, do
not have a proper place to stand:
“
A tactic is a calculated action determined by the absence
of a proper locus. …It must play on and
with a terrain imposed on it and organised by
a foreign power.
It does not have the means to keep to itself
- … it
operates in isolated actions, blow by blow. What
it wins it cannot keep, …it is an art of
the weak. “
In different circumstances
the same person might be both a perpetrator of
strategies and a guerrilla
tactician.
Thus Ruby, safe in possession of her house, can
plan and carry out her strategy to “take
the boy”,
to make Willie her “slave” yet, in
relation to the rest of the world which thinks
she ought to be
in a different kind of “home”, all
her schemes and lies are merely “tactics”,
designed to stave off that seeming inevitability.
The make-shift
nature of much of her behaviour is displayed
early on in the film when she drops her ingratiating
manner towards
the traffic officer as soon as she realises it’s
not going to do her any good.
Rata doesn’t
stay still long enough to make strategies (her
longest range plan is to get the band a P.A.
system)
but she is a brilliant tactician, altering her
and Willie’s
approaches each time they visit the Social Welfare
office, subverting the electricity meter so she
won’t have
to pay the bill and even changing her personality
as she changes her clothes.
In an absolute sense both strategies and tactics
are illusions, dependent on the belief that we
can actually
separate ourselves and our interests from others
on a long-term basis … Ruby, Rata and Willie
come to see that this attitude is a fallacy in
the end, when
they accept an agreement to share the house and
take care of one another. But in the meantime,
the use of
these types of actions, particularly the use
of tactics for a person with little formal power,
can create a kind
of temporary ‘space’ within the field
of everyday action which feels a lot like freedom.
An
obvious concrete expression of the idea of
temporary “space” within
this film, apart from the flat itself, is the
secret passage that Ruby enters to bash away
at the water pipes
in the middle of the night and that Willie uses
as a refuge when he can no longer stand the pressure
of Ruby
and Rata fighting with one another.
Using de Certeau’s
ideas about the nature of everyday life as a
framework does not place the unremitting flood
of falsehood in this film in relation to a system
of
morality but it does help to make it comprehensible
as a series of somewhat unconscious political
acts.
“Culture … develops
in an atmosphere of tensions, and often of violence,
for
which it provides
symbolic balances, contracts of compatibility and compromises,
all more or less temporary. The tactics of consumption,
the ingenious ways in which the weak make use
of the strong, thus lend a political dimension to everyday practice.”
Political Acts are not necessarily
tinged with any sense of right or wrong; they may just
be ways of
responding to a situation. To understand how
a political action,
including and particularly in the case of this
film, a “speech-action”, can be
more successful and its effects more long-lasting
if it has some connection
with a set of ethical beliefs (e.g. if it has
some notion of “equity” or “decency” at
its core) it is useful to take a brief look
at Jurgen Habermas’s
theory of ‘communicative action.’
Habermas
is concerned with what he calls a ‘new
obscurity’ facing Western industrialised
countries whereby their traditional economic
and political systems
no longer have the same power to illuminate
situations and motivate actions; a conclusion
that is not dissimilar
to that of other, more fashionable post-modern
theorists. Nevertheless he does not think that
the only possible
response to this situation is to accept the
legitimacy of what we would know as “free-market” philosophies
which assume that citizens will always make
choices on the individualistic basis of putting
their own comfort
and advantage first.
Indeed, he feels that the
everyday actions and beliefs of people have
a history, depth,
force
and development
all of their own and that, in the end, attempts
at government will fail if they stray too far
from a
relationship with
these informal beliefs.
“The ultimate limits
of political contestation and change in”
advanced capitalist
societies are to be found in what has been too prematurely
given up as
the formless
morass
of ordinary social action … the sociocultural
order has an equal importance and it is not infinitely yielding
and plastic.”
For Habermas “the
formless mass of ordinary social action” includes
the act of communication between individuals. He opposes “communicative
action” which is an attempt to reach agreement between two
individuals on the basis of a free and equal exchange of views
to “strategic action” (close
cousin of the strategies and tactics outlined above) which aims
at triumphing over an opponent with competing interests. Strategic
action is the kind of
action that needs to be employed in order to put into practice
free-market philosophies.
In order for “communicative” action
not to degenerate into “strategic” action,
that is to degenerate into an attempt to put something over on
somebody else, Habermas asserts that it must pass three tests
and, he feels that every time
we hear someone else speak we are automatically measuring their
speech against these three standards. Firstly, is their speech
cognitively true … if
they say “it is raining”, is it actually raining?
Secondly, is it normatively correct or “right” … does
it accord with our customary social values? Can we accept what
the
person is saying? And thirdly,
does what they are saying seem true to them? Are they sincere
in their speech? If all these three tests of truth, rightness
and
truthfulness are met, on both
sides, then genuine communication is taking place.
So high are
Habermas’s hopes for the social benefits of accomplished
and unforced communication and so rare is its occurrence in actuality
that his comments about it can take on a Utopian flavour:
“The Pursuit of Happiness might
one day mean something different – for
example, not accumulating material objects of which one disposes
privately, but bringing about social relations in which mutuality predominates
and satisfaction
does not mean triumph of one over the repressed needs of
the other.”
The speeches that Ruby and Rata make
to each other and to the other persons they are trying
to influence clearly do not
often pass
all three tests
for communicative competence … mostly being of the
kind of communication commonly known as a “lie” … that
is, unable to meet the first requirement of being “true”.
It’s interesting to note though,
that they try very hard to meet the second test of normative “rightness”.
They are extremely careful to say what they think other
people would expect them to say if they were actually who
they claimed
to be … which is what
makes Rata’s sessions with the Social Welfare man
so funny. (“We
use creativity and innovation to raise funds” she
chimes, making a very veiled reference to all her various
scams,
when he asks her how she’s
doing for money). In general the film seems to be making
the satirical point that you can get away with doing almost
anything as long as you say the “right” or
socially-approved thing for that time.
The criterion of “sincerity” is
also elusive, at least during the first half of the film.
When Ruby yells at Rata “you’re not right,
you won’t do at all!” she is clearly sincere
in her feelings at least for a moment but after that
the sincerity goes underground. Instead she
embarks on her covert campaign against Rata, all the
time putting on a smiling face to the world, especially
to the
group of old ladies who, in permanent
occupation of a seat near the “Hindoo’s dairy” are
watching Ruby for any signs of vulnerability.
All kinds
of sound, but particularly the different registers
of speech which show social class, are crucial to the
progression of the film.
Ruby gets
a lot of her information through eaves-dropping while
Buckle is
always trying out the kind of jargon he thinks a mega-successful
real estate
agent would
use. And Rata can switch from genteel businesswoman
to
shouting harridan in
a few seconds. Willie, however, is effectively silent
for the first half of the movie and, standing in his
silence,
he serves
as both
an observer
and a
judge of what others are saying.
His style of expression
is largely pre-linguistic. He makes up little magic
rituals and seems to be trying
to communicate
with
the forces
of nature
rather than with other human beings, perhaps in the
hope
that the strength of his
hope and belief will make things go the way he wants
them to go.
Nevertheless, although he is quiet
he is the one
who actually
hears
what is going
on. When Ruby is trapped in the bath, he hears
the sound of the shower curtain
ripping
and goes off to investigate. Near the end of the
film, he is trying to defuse the conflict and resolve
his
own pain
by speaking
out
about what
matters
to him and telling the women he cares for both
of them … “But
I love Ruby, Mum,” yet Rata still refuses
to hear what he is saying.
Rata has a fine ear for ‘un-truth’,
for bullshit, but she uses her perceptions as another
means of gaining advantage over others. For instance
she interrupts Buckle’s rave about the selling
points of the flat: “True
to its 40s origins” with the deflating “It’s
a nice little place, why didn’t you just
say so?” and goes on to argue him down
on the level of rent she is prepared to pay. The
place where she most often expresses what we can
take to be her true feelings is in the lyrics of
the
songs she sings with the band:
Rata:
“
You can’t tell me what to do. You just want me
to be like you. I’ll
say it again to your face. I’m in my own
space.”
However, her sincerity in this situation
is undercut by the apocalyptic posturings of the
rest of the
band and
by the
possibility that,
due to some quirk of
circumstance which probably relates to the second
test of “rightness”, the rest
of the speech-community (and the film audience?)
does not often accept song as the equal of more
prosaic forms of accredited communication. Indeed,
Habermas’s
theories in general are a bit light on the significance
of “artistic” communicative
action while Ruby and Rata contains several examples
of artistic acts and the ironic humour of jokes
clearly intended as communication.
Still, the redemption
of the power of communication
in this film comes about, and it does come about
despite all I have
been saying
about “falsehood”,
when everybody starts telling each other the truth,
and when they both mean what they say and their
speech corresponds with the actuality of the situation.
There
are temporary breakthroughs scattered throughout
the film. When Ruby is stuck in the bath and is
well on the way
to dying
of hypothermia,
the
communication which she and Rata have with one
another is quite genuine, although they take
the opportunity to break the mood with a joke about
Buckle within seconds of Ruby being rescued. But
significant progress doesn’t come until Ruby
starts to tell Willie the story of her past and
of her sadness for her “one
true love”. The old ladies in the street
later maliciously cast doubt on the veracity of
Ruby’s story but the force of her sincerity
makes it true at the time, which in turn gives
Willie the confidence to speak for
himself. And after that, through “dancing,
making spells and playing crib” they build
up a relationship which saves all of them in the
end.
“How can you base a relationship
on lying?” Rata asks Buckle as things
are beginning to go wrong and her own fraudulent
actions are in the process of being discovered. Yet it’s only when Willie
goes missing and her speech is reduced to terse queries as to his whereabouts
or expressions of panic about
his safety that her communication is genuine across
all three realms. And it’s
ironic but perhaps not inappropriate for a person
who has used speech to dazzle and deceive, that her most sincere act of communication
is not made of words
at all. It’s when she shows Willie that she
understands his depth of feeling for Ruby by putting
a twig on the magic fire he has made to kept Ruby’s
spirit alive.
It is intriguing that about this point,
when all the strategies and tactics, lies and evasions
are
falling
apart, several
references to a traditional
moral framework enter the film. “The Lord
says we must love our neighbours,” Ruby
says as Rata tears strips off her and then she
stands at her window saying the Lord’s Prayer
while Rata dashes around the neighbourhood looking
for Willie, seeking him among a group of people
who are listening to a Salvation Army band.
In the
final scene everybody seems to be back to their
old ways of speaking, with Rata and Buckle
having an
ideological debate
about
state support
for the sick and elderly over Ruby’s supine
body. But the tone of their debate is ironic and
elegiac … that kind of communication has
outlived its time and Ruby silences them with the
announcement that she is “sick of the
charade”. She signs her house over to Willie
and in giving away her property she also entrusts
herself to their charity, as an equal stripped
of the special
power her wealth has given her. “Do with
me what you will” are
her final words.
Like most people writing in the
area of post-modern ethics, Agnes Heller refuses
to say what the content
of a contemporary
(or ‘modern’,) ethical
system should be. She accepts that:
“No single model of a supreme
way of life exists in modernity, nor is modernity a ‘totality’.
Modern men and women experience their world as brittle
and try and inject
as much unity into it as they can or as they deem
fit for
themselves.”
consequently sees human beings
as “created and self-creating systems”,
both responding to and influencing events, their
actions and beliefs always contingent upon their
circumstances. The imposition of any overall system
is
therefore inappropriate and the best we can hope
for, which is not inconsiderable, is to be able
to discuss our own experiences of life with others
in such a
way (both talking and listening) that a shared
vision comes into being as the basis for action.
The reward for that effort of genuine communication
would
be a sense that, albeit temporarily, things are
as good as they can be.
“A society has transformed
its contingency into its destiny if the members of
this society arrive at the awareness that they
would prefer to live at no other
place and at no other time than the here and now.
“And it is only modern
society that can transform its contingency into its
destiny because
it is only now that we have arrived
at the consciousness of contingency.”
And in a small way, that’s
what’s happening in the final scene
of Ruby and Rata. Ruby, Willie and Rata have
all come to see clearly both what they need and what they can afford to give
and
Ruby’s statement, in the
guise of surrender, is an announcement of their
joint decision to make the best of their everyday circumstances.
Ruby and Rata
although based so much in the floating, shifting nature of everyday life
in contemporary
New Zealand is
a moral fable looking
at the
ways in which
we ought to treat one another. Its relevance
to larger social issues can be obscured by the fact
that the
two women spend
their time
fighting each
other
for very small gains in territory, when they
could be combining their strength to fight the system
that is
degrading them
both.
Nevertheless it shows quite clearly
how battles for power can be fought on the terrain of
language
and
potentially,
alerts
us to
the problem
of leaving
the responsibility for communicative competence
with others, whose use of communication may
not always
get three ticks
on the criteria
of truth,
rightness
and truthfulness
and who indeed may not really believe that
communication needs to involve dialogue at
all.
NOTES
1) Neill Jillet, Melbourne Age quoted
in NZ Film No 44, September 1991 p7.
2) David Stratton,
The Australian, ibid.
3) Palm Springs Festival Programme,
quoted in NZ Film No 43, May 1991 p8.
4) Michel de Certeau
The Practice of Everyday Life … trans. Stephen
Rendall, University of California Press, 1984 pp. xi
and xiv.
5)
Ibid p. 36.
6) Ibid p. 39.
7) Ibid p. xvii.
8) See Jurgen Habermas, “The New Obscurity: The
Crisis of the Welfare State and The Exhaustion of Utopian
Energies”, Philosophy and Social Criticism 11 Winter 1986.
9) Michael Pussy, Jurgen Habermas, London, Tavistock Publications,
1987, p. 88.
10) Jurgen Habermas, Communication and The Evolution of Society, trans.
T. McCarthy, Beacon Press, 1979 p. 199.
11) Agnes Heller, Can Modernity Survive? University of California Press,
1990.
12) Ibid, p. 9.
13) Ibid, p. 41.
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