Taxation narratives of economic gain: Reading bodies transgressively

Feminist Legal Studies

Volumn 5, Issue 2, 1997, Pages 131-168

  Grbich, Judith E ^a  

^a LA TROBE UNIVERSITY   (Australia)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 53249113618     PISSN: 09663622     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1007/BF02684879     Document Type: Article

References (75)

1. K. Gray, "Property in Thin Air", Cambridge Law Journal 50:2 (1991), 252-307, 296.
2. Gray, supra n.3, at 306.
3. Gray, supra n. 1, at 267.
4. On masculinism, see G.C. Spivak, "Feminism and Deconstruction, Again: Negotiating with Unacknowledged Masculinism", in Between Feminism and Psychoanalysis, ed. T. Brennan (London: Routledge, 1989), 206.
5. T. Threadgold, "Language and Gender", Australian Journal of Feminist Studies 6 (1988), 41;
6. R. Hodge and G. Kress, Social Semiotics (Oxford: Polity Press, 1988);
7. T. Threadgold and A. Cranny-Francis, eds., Feminine, Masculine and Representation (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1990).
8. On discourse, the word, and speech, see M. Bakhtin. "Discourse in Dostoevsky", in M. Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, ed. and trld. C. Emerson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 181.
9. More generally on the dialogic see M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, trld. C. Emerson and M. Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981);
10. M. Bakhtin, Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, trld. V.W. McGee (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986).
11. F. de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, intro. by J. Culler (Glasgow: Fontana/Collins, 1974).
12. For a discussion of this emphasis on system and process, and the work of Halliday and Hjelmslev, see C. Poynton, "The Privileging of Representation and the Marginalising of the Interpersonal; a Metaphor (and More) for Contemporary Gender Relations", in Feminine, Masculine and Representation, supra n.5, at 237.
13. Poynton's references to these writers are M.A.K. Halliday, "An Interview with Michael Halliday by Paul J. Thibault", in Language topics: Essays in honour of Michael Halliday, ed. R. Steele and T. Threadgold (Amsterdam: Benjamins, 1987), Vol.2, pp.601-627;
14. L. Hjelmslev, Prolegomena to A Theory of Language, trld. F.J. Whitfield (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1961).
15. Copyright: Hanson White-Accord Ltd., U.K. Published by courtesy of John Sands Pty Ltd., Australia.
16. The people behind the teller machine scenario is a familiar fantasy in Australia for viewers of a chocolate bar commercial on television. The commercial utilizes this fantasy of there being human people in the machine who can view the "client" outside and provide unheard commentary on the behaviour of the "client". My memory of the commercial includes the client being rewarded with a chocolate bar being passed out of the machine. In my adaptation of this scenario the voice of the automatic teller machine is that of Lily Tomlins, in her US television comedy routine of some twenty years ago as the telephonist.
17. M. Bakhtin, "Characteristics of Genre and Plot Composition in Dostoevsky's Works", in Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, trld. C. Emerson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 101-180, at 102.
18. See also in the same volume M. Bakhtin, "The Hero, and the Position of the Author with regard to the Hero, in Dostoevsky's Art", at 47-77.
19. J.E. Grbich, "The Form of the Tax Reform Story: Marshall, Ordinary Meanings and the City Men", Griffith Law Review (1996, forthcoming).
20. J. Grbich, "Writing Histories of Revenue Law: the New Productivity Research", Law in Context 11:1 (1993), 57-77;
21. and more generally on bodies and practices of proof in law: J. Grbich, "The Body in Legal Theory", University of Tasmania Law Review 11 (1992), 26-58;
22. a shortened version appears in M. Fineman and N. Thomadsen, eds., At the Boundaries of Law: Feminism and Legal Theory (New York: Routledge, 1991), 61-76.
23. These poetics of lakes and streams and trees are discussed further in part III.
24. J. Kristeva, "The System and the Speaking Subject", in The Kristeva Reader, ed. Toril Moi (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 24-33, at 28.
25. See also J. Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984).
26. Bakhtin, "The Hero ...", supra n.11, at 52.
27. I prefer to retain a notion of the symbolic in language, along the lines of Saussure's differentiation of those signifiers as symbolic where the opposition and relation between the concept and its signifier is not wholly arbitrary, but where instead, "there is the rudiment of a natural bond between the signifier [psychological or sensory impression made on the senses] and the signified [concept]". Without this opposition of arbitrary and natural bonds between sensory impressions made by concepts and the concepts themselves, that is, the repetition of cartesian dualisms within which the objective models for enacting subjectivity are embedded, with what materials could bodies be understood as exceeding their carapace of disjointed parts? See Saussure on this differentiation, supra n.7, at 68.
28. J. Kristeva, "Semiotics: A Critical Science and/or a Critique of Science", in The Kristeva Reader, supra n.15, 74-88, at 76.
29. Kristeva, "Semiotics", supra n.18, at 77.
30. Kristeva, supra n.18, at 85.
31. Kristeva, supra n.18, at 82.
32. Kristeva, supra n.18, at 82.
33. Saussure, supra n.7, at at 79, 115.
34. Kristeva, supra n.18, at 83.
35. Kristeva, supra n.18, at 83.
36. S. Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (London: Pelican Books, 1976), 202.
37. Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams ibid, at 684.
38. Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams ibid. 684.
39. J. Grbich, "The Taxpayer's Body: Genealogies of Exertion", in Thinking through the Body of the Law, eds. Pheng Cheah, David Fraser and Judith Grbich (Sydney: Allen and Unwin and New York: New York University Press, 1996), 136-160.
40. R. Jennings, Natural Elements of Political Economy (New York: Augustus Kelley, 1969, [1855]).
41. Jennings, supra n.30.
42. Grbich, "The Taxpayer's Body: Genealogies of Exertion", supra n.29.
43. Jennings, supra n.30, at 112.
44. Kristeva, supra n.18, at 85.
45. Call this calibration the fine-tuning of the human machine, or, if you wish, recognise it as the fixing of wage levels in industrial economies using paradigms of "labour law" or "industrial arbitration": Grbich, "Taxpayer's Body", supra n.29.
46. A. Marshall, Elements of Economics of Industry [1879], 3rd edit. 1890,
47. being the first edition of Principles of Economics.
48. See Grbich, "The Form of the Tax Reform Story", supra n. 12.
49. Grbich, supra n.12.
50. W. Petty, "A Treatise of Taxes and Contributions", in C. Hull, ed., The Economic Writings of Sir William Petty, vol. I (1662), reprint 1964.
51. Grbich, "The Taxpayer's Body", supra n.29.
52. L. Irigaray, "The 'Mechanics' of Fluids", in L. Irigary, This Sex which is Not One, trld. C. Porter (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), 106-118, at 106.
53. Irigaray, supra n.41, at 110.
54. Helen Grace of University of Western Sydney, Nepean, has pointed out to me the significance of this change in monetary practice.
55. I. Fisher, The Money Illusion (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1927).
56. I. Fisher, The Purchasing Power of Money (New York: MacMillan, 1916).
57. Kristeva, supra n.18, at 85.
58. I. Fisher, Mathematical Investigations in the Theory of Value and Prices [1892] (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1965), 4.
59. W. Stanley Jevons, "Brief Account of a General Mathematical Theory of Political Economy", a paper read before Section F of the British Association at Cambridge in 1862, and Journal of the Statistical Society of London xxix (1966), 282-287,
60. reprinted in W. Stanley Jevons, The Theory of Political Economy [1871] (New York: Augustus Kelley, 1965), 303-314.
61. I. Fisher, "What is Capital?" The Economic Journal 6:1 (1896), 509-534, at 514.
62. Fisher, supra n.49, at 516.
63. I. Fisher. "The Role of Capital in Economic Theory", Economic Journal 7 (1897), 511-537 ,at 512.
64. I. Fisher, The Rate of Interest, revised in 1930 as The Theory of Interest [1930] (New York: Augustus Kelley, 1965), 13. My page numbers are from the 1965 reprint of the 1930 revision.
65. Fisher, The Rate of Interest, at 20.
66. Fisher had in 1896 begun his "What is Capital?" with the proposition that it might be called "that portion of wealth owned by persons of the male sex", and if an author (not him) did this, "it is unquestionably true that no mistaken conclusions would necessarily follow. But it is also true that no conclusions whatever, of scientific import, could then be stated or proved of 'capital'". See Fisher, "What is Capital?", supra n. 49, at 509.
67. Fisher, Theory of Interest, at 6.
68. Fisher, Theory of Interest, at ibid., at 24.
69. Fisher, supra n.52 at 10.
70. My emphasis here on language as "talk with substance" is made in distinction to the Gray theorisation of property language as being "merely talk without substance - a filling of empty space with empty words", see Gray, supra n.1, at. 306.
71. Fisher, Theory of Interest, at 4.
72. Fisher, Capital and Income, at 171.
73. Fisher, Capital and Income, at ibid, at 171.
74. Fisher, Capital and Income, at 176.
75. C. Bird, Automatic Teller (Sydney: Random House, 1996), 7.