Foucault The Legacy Edited by
Clare O'Farrell
Photographs by Richard O'Farrell
Queensland University of Technology
First published in 1997 in book form by Queensland University of Technology Victoria Park Road Kelvin Grove, Qld Australia 4059 First published as a CD-ROM in 2002. Compilation, editorial matter and Introduction copyright © Clare O’Farrell © Individual authors retain copyright of their work. Photographs on jacket and on section dividers copyright © Richard O’Farrell
ISBN 1 86435 567 0
Design by O’Farrell, Lesley Cassidy, Jean Hilton Photos scanned by Vivienne Wilson and Clare O’Farrell Jacket design by Clare O’Farrell and Vivienne Wilson Printed in Brisbane by QUT Publications and Printing
Copies of this book can be ordered from: Clare O’Farrell School of Cultural and Language Studies QUT Victoria Park Road Kelvin Grove, Qld Australia 4059 Fax: +61 7 3864 3728 email:
[email protected] website: http://www.foucault.qut.edu.au CRICOS No. 00213J
Contents Acknowledgments ............................................................................... ix Textual Note ........................................................................................... x Introduction ........................................................................................... 1 Foucault: A View from the Antipodes
Clare O'Farrell .................................................................................................... 1
Part One: Literature and History ..................................................... 11 Sade as a Figure Of Radical Modernity: Making-and-Breaking the History of Sexuality
Peter Cryle ......................................................................................................... 12 Foucault/ Artaud: The Madness of the Oeuvre
Edward Scheer ................................................................................................... 17 Eleutheromania: Freedom and Surveillance in Beckett and Foucault
Anthony Ulhmann ............................................................................................ 27 The Memoir, The Corpse and the Bad Judge: Foucault and Bataille
Shane Wilcox ..................................................................................................... 38 The Body and Violence: The Subject of Knowledge in Dostoesvky's The Brothers Karamazov and Foucault's Analytic of Finitude
Slobodanka Vladiv-Glover ................................................................................. 46 Foucault and New Historicism in Literary Studies
Claire Colebrook ................................................................................................ 57
Part Two: Australian History: Art, Science and Government .... 63 History and the Painted Landscape in Mid-Nineteenth Century South Australia
Russell Staif.f...................................................................................................... 64 Foucault's 'Statement' and Paradigm Change in Nineteenth Century Australia
Mary Mackay .................................................................................................... 80 Governing at a Distance: the Colonisation of Australia
Gavin Kendall .................................................................................................... 90 Foucault, Ideology and the Social Contract in Australian History
Geoff Danaher .................................................................................................. 104
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Part Three: Art, Architecture and Cities ....................................... 111 Art, Politics and the History of Change
Thomas Wallgren ............................................................................................ 112 A Panoptic Art History? The Dilemma of Context
Andrew McNamara ........................................................................................ 121 'Making Facile Gestures Difficult': Artists, Criticality, and the Politics of Publicness
Rob Garrett ...................................................................................................... 128 Foucault's Gaze
Jean Hillier ....................................................................................................... 139 'Architectural Irregularities': Discourse and Technique in a Foucauldian History of the Picturesque Cottage
John Macarthur ............................................................................................... 155
Part Four: Philosophy ...................................................................... 175 The Ethics of Singularity in an Era of Complete Nihilism
Mika Ojakangas ............................................................................................... 176 An Exegesis of the Text Was ist Aufkliirung? Foucault's Intellectual Testament
Jorge Davila ..................................................................................................... 185 Clutter and Glitter: Foucault and the Writing of History
Andrew Thacker .............................................................................................. 192 Foucault, Politics and the Performative
Patricia Moynihan .......................................................................................... 202 The Subject of Foucault
Michael Janover ............................................................................................... 215 Foucault, Dialogue and the Other
Chris Falzon .................................................................................................... 227 Atrocity Mechanics: Is there a Logic to Modern Inhumanity?
Paul Alberts ..................................................................................................... 235 The Disorder of Things: Foucault and Comic Writing
Tony Schirato .................................................................................................. 244 Beyond Power /Knowledge, or Towards Erasing the Distinction Between the Discursive and Non-discursive
George Petelin ................................................................................................. 248 Foucault's Sublime: E-Mail to Postumius Terentianus
Philip Barker .................................................................................................... 257
Contents
Part Five: Psychoanalysis ................................................................ 265 Foucault, Hegel, Psychoanalysis and Anthropologies of Truth David Holmes .................................................................................................. 266 Cathexis: Metaphorics of Power Tony Thwaites ................................................................................................. 279
Part Six: Feminism ............................................................................ 287 Foucault's 'Care of the Self': Some Implications for Feminist Politics Maya Lloyd ...................................................................................................... 288 Feminist History After Foucault Gail Reekie ....................................................................................................... 298 Poststructuralism, Feminism and the Question of Rape: Rethinking the 'Desexualisation' Politics of Michel Foucault Kylie Stephen ................................................................................................... 309 Brand News: Using Foucault to Theorise Rape, the Media and Feminist Strategies Chris Atmore ................................................................................................... 321 Normalising Equality: Surveillance and the 'Equitable' Public Servant D. H. Jones ...................................................................................................... 334
Part Seven: Truth, Law and Medicine .......................................... 345 The Production of Truth: Body and Soul Part 1: 'Telling Truths': Truth Telling in the Judicial Process Dirk Meure ...................................................................................................... 346 The Production of Truth: Body and Soul Part 2: Displaying the Truth of the Body Randall Albury ................................................................................................ 356 Legal Language As Discursive Formation Christine Higgins ............................................................................................ 361
Part Eight: The Art of Government ............................................... 373 'Liberalism' and Government: Political Philosophy and the Liberal Art of Rule David Burchell ................................................................................................ 374 A Political Ontology Mitchell Dean .................................................................................................. 385 Culture and Utility: Calculating Culture's Civilising Effect Tony Bennett ................................................................................................... 398 What Is An Expert?
f. P. Minson ..................................................................................................... 405
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Computers and Governmentality in Australia's Department of Social Security
Paul Henman ................................................................................................... 418 Governing Chinese Bodies: The Significance of Studies in the Concept of Governmentality for the Analysis of Birth Control in China Gary Sigley ...................................................................................................... 429 A Foucauldian Genealogy of Income
Ratnam Alagiah and Michael Gaffikin ........................................................... 447 'This Is Not A Prison': Foucault, The Panopticon And Pentonville
John Pratt ........................................................................................................ 462
Part Nine: Management Studies .................................................... 483 Foucault, Power, Social Theory and the Study of Organisations
Stewart Clegg .................................................................................................. 484 Foucault and Management Studies: Post-critical critique? Shayne W. Grice .............................................................................................. 492
Part Ten: Public Relations ............................................................... 499 Constructing Publics: Foucault's Power/ Knowledge Matrix and the Genealogy of Public Relations and Press Agentry
P. David Marshall ........................................................................................... 500 The Role of Public Relations in Empowering Groups and Institutions: A Study
Elizabeth Logan ............................................................................................... 507 Women Politicians: Media Objects or Political Subjects?
Judy Motion ..................................................................................................... 518
Part Eleven: Policing the Environment ........................................ 529 Governing the Environment: the Programs and Politics of Environmental Discourse
Ade Peace ......................................................................................................... 530 Policing Nature: Ecology, Natural Science and Biopolitics
Paul Rutherford ............................................................................................... 546
Part Twelve: The 'Third World' and Postcolonialism .............. 563 Pastoral Power: Foucault and the New Imperial Order
Patricia Stamp ................................................................................................. 564 The Colonial Legacy of Regulating 'Third World' Women as the Alluring 'Other'
Parlo Singh ...................................................................................................... 571
Contents
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Part Thirteen: Education .................................................................. 591 Personal Autonomy As An Aim of Education: a Foucauldian Critique James Marshall ................................................................................................ 592 Ethics, Technics, Politics: Australian Debates on Competencies and Citizenship Denise Meredyth ............................................................................................. 603 Competency-Based Training- Taylorism Revisited? Bert Wigman ................................................................................................... 614 'This Slender Technique': Examining Assessment Policy Daphne Mead more .......................................................................................... 620 Michel Foucault, Dorothy Heathcote, Drama and Early Childhood Kathleen Warren ............................................................................................. 631 Reconceptualising Parent and Child Conflict: A Foucauldian Perspective Susan Grieshaber ............................................................................................. 639 Power Relations in Pedagogy: An Empirical Study Based on Foucauldian Thought Jennifer M. Gore .............................................................................................. 651 Beyond The Panopticon: Accounting For Behaviour In Parent-Teacher Communications Jayne Keogh ..................................................................................................... 664 Disciplining Students: The Construction of Student Subjectivities Barbara Grant .................................................................................................. 674
Part Fourteen: Health and Nursing ............................................... 685 Foucault Had to Die Shamefully Michael Bartos ................................................................................................. 686 The New Morality: Public Health and Personal Conduct Alan Petersen .................................................................................................. 696 The Rhetoric of Health Care? Foucault, Health Care Practices and the Docile body - 1990s style Julianne Cheek and Trudy Rudge ................................................................... 707 Using Foucauldian Ideas to Analyse a Problem Concerning Women and the Environment Elaine Stratford ............................................................................................... 714 The Health of Our Children: A National Efficiency Framework for a Nation Janet Schmitzer ................................................................................................ 723
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Foucault and Gerontological Knowledge: The Making of the Aged Body Stephen Katz .................................................................................................... 728 Action Research in a Nursing Home: Theorising Critical Incidents Arising from Action Through a Foucauldian View of Institutional Power Sue Crane ........................................................................................................ 736 Toward a Critical Ontology: Nursing and the Problem of the Modern Subject Kim Walker ...................................................................................................... 743
Repositioning the Nurse Suzanne Goopy ................................................................................................ 755
Part Fifteen: Marketing Foucault ................................................... 765 The Name of the Author Clare O'Farrell ................................................................................................ 766 Condensing Foucault Alec McHoul ................................................................................................... 771
Contributors ....................................................................................... 783
Acknowledgments
The writings in this volume were originally presented as papers at a conference titled Foucault: The Legacy which took place at the beach resort of Surfer's Paradise in Australia in July 1994. I would like to express my gratitude here to all those who helped in the organisation of that conference. The French Embassy and Queensland University of Technology provided financial assistance and I wish to acknowledge, in particular, the generous support of Gerard Guillet and Francis Etienne at the French Embassy in Canberra. Canon and Xerox contributed towards printing costs for the conference. I would also like to thank my colleagues at QUT in the School of Cultural and Policy Studies and the Department of Continuing Professional Education, in particular, Margaret Johnston, Lesley Cassidy and Michelle Dwyer. Many others were also most generous with their time and help in organising various aspects of the conference, in particular staff at the Ramada Hotel, Ozaccom, Roger Mackell, manager of Gleebooks in Sydney and Nicholas Tsoutas, Director of the Institute of Modern Art in Brisbane in 1994. In the production of the current volume, I am indebted to my typists Lesley Cassidy and Jean Hilton for their persistence through what seemed at times to be an endless task. I also wish to thank my family, in particular my mother, to whom I owe the original idea for the conference, as well as friends and colleagues for the encouragement which has helped me finally bring this book to completion. The photographs by my brother Richard which appear on the front cover and on the pages dividing the sections of the book were exhibited at the conference.
Textual Note Every effort has been made to establish a minimum level of consistency with regards to references and footnotes, but given the wide diversity of disciplines represented in this volume, different conventions have been retained in individual papers.
Introduction Foucault: A View from the Antipodes
An intellectual itinerary It was in 1978, as a young undergraduate, that I first came across Foucault.l
The item in question was an article titled 'The position of Cuvier in the history of biology'2 set and specially translated by one of the tutors, Paul Foss for a course in the School of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of New South Wales. Fascinated by the extreme difficulty of the piece, I decided that I would take up the challenge of writing a paper on it. If difficulty is sometimes no more than a facade to hide an inner void, the analysis of this article by Foucault revealed a type of thought strikingly attractive in its combination of extreme orderliness and brilliant intuitive insight, providing as it did an entirely new and excitingly different point of view on familiar scenery. The effect was similar to viewing those reversible diagrams so cherished by psychologists. The next work of Foucault's which I tackled, this time in a course on methodology, was The Archaeology of Knowledge.3 Having digested this further and much larger cocktail of anarchic insight and rigorous order, I was hooked. I would write my honours thesis on Foucault. At the time, it was considered a radical move to undertake academic work on a thinker who was still very much alive particularly one with such unorthodox views on method and the history of thought. But my supervisors in the Schools of French and History and Philosophy of Science, in particular Randall Albury, were keenly supportive and Foucault certainly seemed far more exciting and daring than the other alternatives I had been toying with- Gaston Bachelard and Henri Bergson. Added to this, was the enjoyable prospect of being able to write and deliver papers on ideas which genuinely shocked and outraged a large part of the older academic establishment. Indeed, in the late seventies in Australia, as elsewhere in the English speaking world, only a small number of people had even heard of Foucault and fewer still were inclined to take his work seriously. A small group of academics in Sydney were notable in this regard: they included Paul Patton, Meaghan Morris, Paul Foss, Randall Albury and George Alexander. In 1979, some members of this group published the first book to appear in English on the subject of Foucault's work that was not purelyacollectionofFoucault'sownwritings.4 Thebookwaslaunchedwith a series of three papers by Paul Patton, George Alexander and myself to an unexpectedly large gathering of about 150 people at the University of Sydney. Paul Patton also ran a small reading group on Discipline and Punish at the same university with an audience whom I found fascinating by virtue
2
!foucau[t: l'! why,~ l\ltddrt, dread. Such city sites as the ~tmfirm£d Patric-~'s low ofho- new hlhtllt'. ·~Ibe .dcV'-dopen.l"td pW:Jt'd do~ the jv~.~ Octagon evoke an an~elonglng to-ft communitarian ideals o.f :m.:I CMtnJI yout' of civic belonging and I lif'l.'. lt·m.lh-10 itt'!f'3t r;:h;m~;· I '""""""'"'· · . · _. . ?h~,a.::~....~......,......."................... "' participation. City plaI Dunedin. It's all,tlgbthere. zas, malls, and Dunedin's Octagon, with their wide open spaces, ease of pedesFigure 1: Artist Pat Altman in Dunedin promotional trian access, and high adertisement, "Does changing your view, change your views? incidence of cafes and It's all right here." North and South, (April1994):33; restaurants are inCourtesy of Dunedin City Council. tended to encourage certain classes of people to linger, perhaps to meet and to talk. These are spaces of intense (and usually displaced) desire, often involving a nostalgia for a communal togetherness and participation on the model of an imagined pre-modern European utopia. Yet in practice, and instead, they facilitate the exercise of possessive individualism and the unfettered pursuit of privacy: the market participation of dedifferentiated and anonymous consumers who are addressed as if possessing pre-existing identities. This is the epitome of liberal pluralism, in which the market substitutes the idea of publicness, of speech and action, with the private consumption of spectacle and nomination of choices. City malls most persistently offer pre-packaged options for which there are predetermined appropriate responses- the options of the market place mitigate against answering back, despite the seductive simulacra of participation in the question and answer formats of market surveying, and brand-name differentiation. One example of the privatisation and loss of space can be seen in the absence of legal street sites for posters. Last year in preparing for a public meeting on art politics in the community, our poster distributors were not Th~ 1.\ntt.tlit thrdem;, w~~h
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unexpectedly hassled by the police: this denial of a public sphere is achieved under the rhetoric of public safety and cleanliness. But the public defended is one much reduced in its representativeness. What is encountered in the aggressive policing of poster walls around the city, apart from the privatisation of city streets, is their designation as 'defensible space' in the face of imaginary dangers. The danger lies in the very idea of a crowd without a name, the crowd without identity- the very epitome of a radical democracy -the not-yet-packaged, not-yet-imagined 'people's voice(s)'. According to this logic, 'security' has less to do with personal safety than with insulating individuals in their 'residential, work, consumption and travel environments, from "unsavoury" groups and individuals, even crowds in general'. 3 This privatisation of the rhetoric of 'public safety' is a smoke screen which plays on the fear of the spontaneity of the masses, or the risk of the unexpected in the performance of public appearance. Symptomatic of the regulation of everyday life are Dunedin's over-policed parking meters, the 'clear-flow' one way traffic systems, and the graffiti clean-ups which have culminated in a proliferation of 'happy walls': murals and 'Keep Dunedin Beautiful' exhortations on fences, the walls of vacant lots, and bus shelters throughout the city, many of which have been produced by organised groups of school children, constituting a technique of prohibition in the name of innocence and purity. Predictably too, the skateboarders who have recently occupied the Octagon are being required to negotiate with the City Council over their forced relocation away from pedestrian areas. And most recently, last month, the Police have declared they want 3 am closing of all licensed premises in The Centre to reduce 'disorder in the central city'. 4 The publicness construed in this discourse of security, and the public approved for travel within the intensively capitalised central zone of the city, is very limited indeed. Within this regime, the disease-carrier is permitted at the periphery, but constrained by a solemn edict, under a prohibition on leakages which might contaminate the public body. And it as such, as a sanctioned viral carrier, or muta(ge)nt, that the body of the artist is construed. 'He' is a reservoir, and translated as feminine by recourse to epidemiology5 and an archaeology of creative genius. 6 A body at once chaotic and unstably bounded, the cultural inscription of the Dunedin artist is as both passive and at the same time latently dynamic, indolent and yet with the potential to be excited to spontaneous outbursts of expressive passion and the dangerous release of toxicity. In a recent Dunedin newspaper article, there is a photograph of local 'Painter Kelly Michael' (see Fig.2). He is pictured preparing for a forthcoming exhibition, standing at an easel, ostensibly working, with a palette in one hand and a brush poised as if stroking the canvas. Superficially, in the text and the photograph, the emphasis is on the 'work' of art, the artist says: 'In a way I am in a factory- it's the daily grind of a painting factory? As well as the artist and his easel in the photo, parts of the studio are visible, revealing the clutter of other work, painting rags, and paint-splattered walls in the theatrical cast of light from a skylight. Yet it is the artist's gaze which distracts me, a gaze that must be imagined because his eye sockets are deep
'Making j'acife (jestures 'DifficuCt'
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Figure 2: Painter Kelly Michael, in Charmian Smith, "Artist just likes pushing paint around on canvas", Otago Daily Times, (15 February 1994):17; Courtesy of Otago Daily Times.
in shadow. It is the passive-receptive gaze of the feminine male. It is the gaze ofthepermeableandleakingimagination.IsthisagazesignifyingFoucault's 'abyss of the [art]work's absence'; a feminised 'void' all darkness and chaos around which the 'lyrical halo' is cast; the 'moment of silence' the work of art opens?S The painter's gaze is not directed at the canvas or the palette, in contradistinction to the newspaper text's emphasis on labour, neither does the gaze overtly acknowledge the photographer's and viewer's presence in the manner of the publicity photograph. Rather, it is a simulacrum of the waiting pre-requisite to creative inspiration. His gaze is directed into the inbetween, downwards into the space beyond the palette resting in his hand, into the space between his body and the other bodies framing this view of the artist. Cast down, this gaze becomes a sign of his feeling (and waiting) rather than his seeing and thinking. It is this pictorialised gaze which resignifies the studio as imagination's chamber, as the void of potential in which the artist waits, and which re-signifies the artist as the reservoir and tributary of inspiration and the gift. The reporter's text inscribes this space and the artist's waiting with the twin markers of romantic creativity: the void and the trace, the emptiness of waiting and the cluttered detritus of activity, the sign of passivity on the one hand, and of spontaneity on the other. Such readings impute to the artist personality a true or deep prelinguistic self-hood receptive to, in the artist's own words, the 'rollercoaster' ride of inspiration. This kind of romantic rhetoric is not confined to the self-definitions of a few artists in the Dunedin milieu, it also appears in the writing of some local critics, and resonates in art teaching practice nationally; and while such sentiments may not dominate, they do circulate as an accepted legitimising practice. Even practices that might elsewhere be nominated as typifying postmodern appropriative irony, in Dunedin, often get translated according
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to discourses of romantic creativity. By such means, for example in the case of Auckland artist Peter Gibson Smith, (see Fig.3) in Dunedin on a one-year Fellowship, the artist's particular techniques become the signifiers of creative originality; and appropriation, re-textualised as the manipulation of other people's images, is made to signify the artist's expressive intentionality, and the transformation of the raw into the cooked. Local art writer, Charmian Smith, legitimises the appropriative strategies of Peter Gibson Smith's work in terms consistent with notions of the artist as originator, and the artwork as gesture and trace, by emphasising the manipulative. She describes the artist as 'mixing' other people's images with his own, and she makes it clear that he copies by hand and not mechanically, thus displacing attention from the rubber stamps, and computer and fax generated imagery he employs. The writer goes on to devote most of the feature article to an explanation of the artist's techniques as experimental and novel. The accompanying photograph shows the artist apparently 'at work' on a detail, he is pictured working with his hands holding materials and applying pigment to the surface of his work, much in the same manner as manufacturing corporate images show technicians demonstrating the use of materials and equipment for publicity and product manuals. 9 Though it might be possible to read Gibson Smith's appropriation of a number of canonical European and New Zealand works as critical of notions of authorial originality, the local reading enunciated here evokes a rhetoric which instead claims certain
Figure 3: Artist-in-Residence Peter Gibson Smith, in Charmian Smith, "Manipulating images of others for installation", Otago Daily Times, (8 February 1994):15; Courtesy of Otago Daily Times.
'Making j'acife (jestures 'DifficuCt'
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artists possess a unique spontaneity, and which imputes to the artwork, as the trace of the artist's life, a rejuvenating power. Such attributes are claimed to be in marked contrast to the compulsive and conditioned activity of nonartists, and the pseudo creativity of artists whose work is perceived to be theory-driven. These practices rest on a set of presumptions about the existence and integrity of a pre-linguistic expressive and self-healing subjectivity in dichotomous relation to the socially conditioned and alienated subject. The artist's spontaneity is constituted in opposition to the conformity of the regular worker and the constraining power of work's regular hours, requirements for attention, and obligation to produce a result. In this, there is something of an antipodean translation, almost a mythology, of Situationist philosophy and something akin to Henri Lefebvre's Critique of Everyday Life.lo Yet, perhaps in the spirit of a hybrid Situationist detournement, many of these Bohemian artists claim their art is more individual, more energetic, and more connected to life by its spontaneous and creative revolt. While the artist is unproblematically characterised as both a reservoir and creative originator, as a receptive but also resisting free agent, difference continues to be mapped as a borderland, a refugee enclave, and the raw material for the formative work of desire as an unfillable absence, 11 with political consequences that are regressive and nostalgic. However this romanticism does not go unchallenged in the local milieu: frustrated by the promise and denial of effective political critique, one young woman artist I spoke to was critical of the adolescent escapism which she claims motivates many to drift from one distracting extravaganza to another, across an ocean of sleep and waiting. Why is spontaneity so important in the mythology of Dunedin's Bohemians? So dangerous to the techniques of discipline? Is it because it relies on an essential passivity as its precondition? Or because it is the opposite to compulsive activity, and seemingly beyond discipline, outside the limits of governance? Is it because it is the opposite to work, both manual and mental labour, in its unrestrained exercise of the imagination in complicity with the passions and the desires? 12 In the tradition of the avant-garde there is claimed an intrinsic link between this spontaneity and criticality. A criticality that can be both metaphoric and actual, founded upon the assumption of the primordial immediacy of the artist's expressions. But this criticalityisfundamentallydifferentfromthatwhichFoucaultpracticesand proposes, for his is predicated on a claim of solidarity, that 'after all, we are all governed'. 13 Avant-garde criticality however assumes that spontaneity is a relatively rare phenomenon. The implied moral aesthetic in dichotomising spontaneity and conformity, the primordially expressive and the conditioned subject, is not as useful in thinking through the need for, and means of, deep transformations of political agency, as is a Foucauldian criticality. 'Marginal by imposition, by choice, by necessity', 14 this ghetto-dweller may, at one time or another, or in one relation or another, be critically engagedbut not so intrinsically. And why would the artist find the margins hospitable anyway? Is this the romance of the outlaw? What are the pleasures of the ghetto, of daily crossing its threshold bearing its mark before others? What
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