Speaker 1
This is a Vision Australia Radio podcast.
Speaker 2
On Vision Australia Radio, welcome to our conversations on the work and experiences of emerging writers. I'm Kate Cooper and our guest today is Dr. Guillaume Vetu, who last week joined us here at Vision Australia Radio in Adelaide as our new volunteer coordinator. So it's great that we're able to get to know him through our program. As we mentioned last week, Guillaume comes to us with 20 years of experience in community radio as a broadcaster, trainer and advocate.
Speaker 2
He's also been an academic writer and we started talking last week about his thesis. We'll be picking that conversation up again today. We also talked about growing up in first in Normandy and then for a while in Paris about Guillaume's experiences here in Australia as a musician with his own recording studio.
And we talked about his time living with his wife and two very young children in Japan. That's why I want to pick up today's conversation. Guillaume, welcome Guillaume Vettoux to the program. And I had another question I wanted to ask you before we leave the topic of living in Japan. And that was, did you get the chance to visit any of the well-known places, the tourist sites?
Speaker 3
So a little bit, because my wife was working full time at the university, we didn't get very much time off to, you know, a full touristy thing. And so there's lots of sites we didn't get to. We went to the snow as well. That's one thing that was, I think, quite important for me because I love the snow. I grew up in France and used to go to the snow all the time. So this was an opportunity. And also for my children being Australian, Australians that don't know the snow very much. Even though there is snow here in this country, but not in South Australia, certainly.
Anyway, so we did go to the snow and we did a fair bit. What we did do a lot is small, short little trips. The public transport in Japan is magnificent. There's a train for anywhere. The train network is absolutely incredible. It is cheap, it is super efficient and it is spread absolutely everywhere. So you just can go anywhere you like very quickly and very easily, especially in the region. I don't know if they supply snow to all the regions, but in the Osaka prefecture, it certainly is the case.
And so every weekend, pretty much not every weekend, but almost every weekend, we'd go and see something locally. Having young children, I took my kids to a lot of parks, a lot of amusement parks and recreation parks indoors, outdoors. There's a lot. The whole region of Kyoto and Osaka is kind of a big valley. And so every town there is, of course, it's very built up. There's a lot of concrete. However, on both sides are massive hills, very green, and they don't build there.
Speaker 3
They've stopped, they used to and then they've stopped it a few decades ago. And so now those hills are left alone. And this is all big forests, big greeneries, big parks that you can just visit. And it's left alone, so it's quite wild and it's fantastic.
Speaker 3
So we did a lot of that. We did a lot of, there's lots of museums. There's museums everywhere. Has a little anecdote when we came back to Australia after a year in Japan on the first weekend, my kids said, let's go to the museum. Yeah, great idea. And off we went to the South Australian Museum, spent the day there. It was great. We had a great time. They loved it. And then the next weekend, my kids like, let's go to the museum. I told my kids, well, we went last week and they say, well, no, no, but another museum. I said, I'm sorry, kids. This is it. There's no other museum to go to. So they had to sort of adapt back to the Australian way, you know, which is distances are a real prohibitor.
Speaker 2
Sure. I mean, there are those community museums or small museums in country towns here, absolutely, which you would have come across in your days as a traveling musician.
Speaker 3
Absolutely, but the problem is that it still requires a few hours of drive. It's a whole adventure. In Japan, we just walk down to the station, be on the train or two trains for 20, 30 minutes. And here we are in a completely different environment and with massive amount of different things to do.
Speaker 2
That's right, it sounds so different. Sounds fantastic. And do your children keep up any of their Japanese now that they're back here?
Speaker 3
So my daughter still can read Hiragana, the different letters, and I think also even katakana, I'm not sure. Anyways, but we have a game at home that we play, which is a reading learning game that's Japanese, where you have to pick up the sign and the from the word that it starts. I'm not very good at it. My daughter is excellent at it. And so is my wife.
Speaker 2
Fantastic. Guillaume, I want to come back to your studies now. You told us in last week's program the title of your PhD thesis, and I'm going to ask you to repeat it rather than have me attempt to get it right.
05:11
Speaker 3
with pleasure, it's called, Beyond the Tree of the Living Dead, a Riso Analysis of Japanese Cinematic Zombies. So I'll explain to you in a bit more detail what it's about. So there's two things about it, which is a method. A lot of it is methodology, and the other part is a subject on which I use the method, because I figured if I'm going to come up with something very theoretical and convoluted in terms of a method, I thought it'd be more interested. It's one thing to come up with it in theory. This is something that you could do, and doesn't that sound so exciting or interesting? That's one thing, but isn't it better to then go on to say, well, and here's an example of a subject that you can apply it to, and that's what it looks like when you do, and that's what it looks like in terms of the results you can get, right? To make it all very concrete.
So the method is called Riso Analysis. I didn't come up with the term. The term Riso Analysis came from an American scholar called Donna Alverman, who's retired now, and it's based on a philosophical principle called the Rhizome, which originates from two French thinkers called Deleuze and Gattari. Now, those guys in the 70s sort of explored a lot of alternative ways of approaching the world, and the term itself Rhizome, it's kind of a short paper, which they published in 1976, simply called Rhizome, in an introduction, which they then use as the first chapter of their next big book, which was called A Thousand Plateaus, which is kind of quite known, and that's from 1980.
So, but the text itself, the text Rhizome, is a self -contained little thing. A Thousand Plateaus is massive. It's a massive thing to sort of approach and try to understand. It's not quite the theory of relativity, but it's close in terms of complexity and how obscure it can get. The idea of the Rhizome is really quite simple. The idea is everything we approach, and we have so since classical times, we use the image of a tree. Everything comes back to a tree. So if you look at genealogy, if you look at hierarchy, it's always trees or roots.
Okay, you've got one center trunk and then branches coming out and from these branches separate in other branches, etc. Or you've got roots, you've got a hierarchy, you've got a head that then separates into little roots. So trees and roots, right? And what Dolors and Gatari try to remind us is this system is great. It works very well to categorize things, to understand where things may come from, how they relate to each other, and everything around us can be placed on this model.
And that works quite well to understand something. However, as a society, we've kind of forgotten that this is just a model. This is just a tool to help us understand. It can't be the beginning of our understanding. This can just be we observe something in the world that we want to understand better and we use this image of the tree, the branches, the roots, we apply to it and then we may understand a little bit.
But life is not like trees or branches. Things are not like trees or branches. It's much more complex than that. So they propose the idea of a rhizome and a rhizome is a type of plant that exists in the world which grow in all directions. So they have roots, they push roots down in the ground. They do also have branches. So they have stems and leaves that grow up. However, they also propagate on the surface or below the surface horizontally in all directions and every now and then a bit more roots, a bit more stems in all directions.
So that's the beginning of the idea. So maybe things in life are a bit more like that. They go in all directions, not just up and down, but also in all directions and kind of randomly. But furthermore, a rhizome, if you cut a section of the rhizome, both sections continue growing on their own. They've got their own independent sort of way of growing again randomly in all directions. And finally, and that's when it becomes really interesting, two separate bits of rhizome, if they actually meet each other, they will connect and become one again. Right? So that's the analogy. That's the image. From that, Deleuze and Gatari developed quite a complex philosophical system to sort of talk about the world in a bit more of an open way than we normally would in classical terms.
And they see the rhizomatic approach as an anti -classical. A classical approach can be useful, but it is not as accurate, perhaps, or as useful as this other way, the rhizome way. So Alvaman took these ideas, and I'm shortening here. It's a bit complex, but took these ideas and developed a method of analysis that is separate from the classical way. And so from her method, her method was very introspective. She used it for her own research. And it was all about she picked a subject, a research that she had completed, and then she thought, I wonder if I could apply rhizome analysis to this research and see if it would engender some new findings.
And she did, but it was all very much about her own approach. She would reread everything that she'd read. She would reread all her notes, reanalyze them using this different method, using Deleuze and Gatari's approach. So what I did is I took the principles of that and made it a method that can be applied for anything, not just your own introspective exploration, but for any subject. And a good one is a subject like films, because films are, by definition, made by other people and a whole lot of different other people.
So wouldn't that be interesting if you could do that with the texts like that? And I thought what would be interesting is to find a subject that nobody has explored before. That way, I could do both and compare. I could approach the subject in real classical terms in terms of categorizing, finding meaning and linking things in a static way, such as you do with roots and branches. This comes from there and then it becomes that. And then do it the rhizome analysis way and see the different ways. So that was the idea. And so the subject I found was the zombie characters within Japanese cinema. The reason why there was an interesting one is because very little had been written about it.
And that's not so surprising. However, what was surprising when I started looking into it is the amount of texts. So to this day, I found over 200 films that feature zombies made in Japan from the 19, the earliest one is 1960s. So there's a lot of texts there. There you go. That's the short version.
12:04
Speaker 2
Oh, Vision Australia Radio, you're listening to our conversation program, Emerging Writers. Our guest today is Dr. Guillaume Vetu, our new volunteer coordinator here at Vision Australia Radio in Adelaide.
When you started talking, I liked the idea that you develop your own methodology and then you test it. And if I were to ask you, and what were your findings, then I'm not trying to reduce the huge amount of work into a brief conversation. So perhaps is there a particular finding or a couple of findings that you can share with us?
Speaker 3
Yeah, and make it accessible. You know, I don't want to be boring already. I feel all my explanation about my method was a bit tenuous. Okay. No, I can attempt to talk about it. What Rhizome analysis does is that it brings forth new questions. So, and this is the thing, a classical approach seeks to produce concrete answers. And Deleuze Gattari argue that, well, life doesn't give you concrete answers. There's no such thing as a concrete answer to anything in this life. If you've lived enough, have met enough people, you will agree that there's not one life. There's an infinity of lives and perspective itself creates lots of different types of realities. Two opposing statements can both be true.
Okay. So, what Rhizome analysis does instead of bringing straight answers, concrete, static answers, it brings questions. And hopefully when it works, new questions, questions that have not been asked before. And by just exploring a question that has not been asked before, then you can start to explore things, right? So, what would happen in my method is I would explore a subject and follow certain lines of inquiries. And then, and I would do that randomly without really knowing the subject itself. You know, at every step, I would have to learn from classical sources and then continue moving towards like that. And then I would come up with a strange question.
And I would be stopped there with a question because there was no classical sources that ever addressed that question. So, there's no answer that is readily available to me. And at that point, I would find an expert of that field. And I would come to them with that question and say, look, I've been looking into it. How about that thing? And I would get two types of answers. First answer is that there is a stupid question because A, B, C, D, right? They're an expert. They can explain clearly why that question itself is dumb. And fair enough, I'm not an expert. So, I'm like, oh, okay. Thank you very much. Goodbye. Or, and that happened a few times, people would go, oh, I never thought of that.
That's really interesting. Now we've got something interesting. Now you've opened up a new line of inquiry. So, for instance, one article that came up from my research is about animism and corporal reality. Animism for listeners is this belief, and it's very common in Japan and in other countries, especially around Asia, the idea that everything has the potential to possess a soul. Okay. And there's a lot of different sets of beliefs that give a soul, a spirit, to inanimate objects.
So, animism, objects that we believe or that seem inanimate become animate, animated, I suppose, by a spirit, right? And it's the whole, in Japan, you've got the yokai, which are like all these entities that they're objects that all of a sudden become animate. And that's what ghosts are about, ghosts are all spirit. So, looking at the zombies in Japan, why are zombies so popular when zombies are supposed to be brainless? They don't have a soul, right? The zombie, as we understand them, is this sort of corpse that still moves around but doesn't have a soul.
And then we look at Japan, and the majority of zombies in Japanese film, in fact, have a soul. So, they break this idea that zombies don't have a soul. They all have, and in fact, a lot of them talk, they get together in groups, come up with strategies to take over the world. It's a fun subject to look into. But the point is, in Japan, it doesn't make sense that a thing does not have a soul. If it moves, it must have a soul. And so, they've completely changed their approach to zombies.
And so, that's why, all of a sudden, you've got all these zombie films coming from Japan, where the zombies talk. I mean, some of them even have their own language with subtitles. So, you've got a bunch of zombies getting together and they go, and then little subtitles, oh, we should do this, we should do that, take over the world. Yeah. So, there's an idea. The article is called, Animist Influence, an Immutable Corporal Reality, Repositioning the Significance of Japanese Cinematic Zombies. So, it's still very niche, but the subject that shows, like I said, is very niche itself.
So, it's not like from that subject, I was going to come up with something that is universally interesting or life -changing for the majority of the population. That was never the case. I picked a subject that was so specific, because I wanted a subject no one had looked into. But if you applied Reiser analysis to a subject that is a bit more universal, you'd probably come up with new questions and new lines of inquiry. And that's what Reiser analysis does. It doesn't give you answers. It brings you in a direction that no one has been before.
17:32
Speaker 2
And what I really like listening to you talking is that idea of an analysis that leads to questions and I'm thinking about it in my own area of study which is translation and film like literature is open to interpretation. So when you move into translation, it is then an interpretation. There isn't many cases. There isn't a right wrong answer. There's a way of interpreting and recommunicating. And so that ability to apply a methodology that gives you the kinds of questions to ask that can help you then make the most appropriate translation decisions for the context that you're in is really appealing.
And certainly in my study, I was trying to move away from these notions of exact equivalents to understand better the nature of equivalents. So I can see how your methodology would really help with that.
Speaker 3
I'm sure everyone has experienced that sometimes just by asking the wrong question sort of stops the inquiry and it's asking questions is really the beginning of understanding things by asking and so it's good to have new questions to ask because then you're likely to understand more.
Speaker 2
And also philosophically, I like the organic nature of the Rhizome approach as you describe because life isn't linear and many cultures don't see life as linear. It can be circular, it can be perceived in a number of different ways, but linear thinking is not necessarily the most appropriate way to perceive of and understand the world that we live in with, as you said earlier, all the different layers of complexity.
Speaker 3
And that's right, you know, it's too restrictive. If you, again, we can all experience this in our everyday life when you meet someone who's just set in their ways, it doesn't work very well. It never does.
Speaker 2
And last week we talked a bit about languages and I want to come back to language which you'll have gathered by now is my favourite topic. You wrote your PhD in a language that wasn't your mother tongue so I'm interested in knowing what it was like for you to write in your second language. Did it help you to be more focused in a way? Speaker 3
I don't know if it helped me to be more focused. It was the logical language for me to write in. So as I told you last week, I came in Australia fairly young, you know, 30 years ago. I'm almost 50 now. And I was quite fluent in English already, but just still a kid really in many ways. Anyways, one of the jobs I got in the early 2000s is I wrote for a local magazine called Rip It Up. Rip It Up Magazine. I don't know. Some of our listeners might remember this stuff was the Street Mag, you know, music, lifestyle, Street Magazine in Adelaide for several decades, I believe. So I wrote reviews there, local CDs reviews, and I would interview some bands and stuff like that.
So I was a casual reviewer and I learned a lot by doing that because of course I would have an editor who became one of my best friends and they would through their editing and you know, their changes, I learned a lot doing that. So I wrote for Rip It Up for a small decade. And when I went to university and studied my bachelor, the first couple of semesters, my papers, you know, I've looked at them since, they know they weren't that great. They weren't that great at all. But I suppose I'm a fast learner and I was determined to write well. I like things that are well written, I suppose. And yeah, it's just got a bit better at it.
And by the time that I finished my bachelor and I was ready to go post grad, I think I was already quite a good writer, but I was certainly not good enough. And I learned a lot in the first year of, I studied as a master and then it turned into a PhD. But my first year of post grad studies, I learned a lot. I learned a lot from my coordinator, my supervisor is the term I'm looking for. Yeah, Professor Peter Pugsley. I should mention him because I owe him a lot. My other supervisor was Dr. John Buterich, both from the University of Adelaide. I owe them a lot because I learned a lot in terms of how to write.
And you know, this PhD, this article, I would not be able to write in French. I think I would struggle immensely to translate it to French, just because I've developed that English language and that academic language in English. I've never been to university in France. I don't read very many, a little every now and then. I mean, the rhizome from Deleuze and Guitari, because it's a short text, I thought I should read it in French. And I did learn a lot by reading it in French. So I read both versions, the translation and the original. But otherwise, all my learning, academic learning has been in English. And so I'm kind of stuck with that language.
I would not be able to go in French at all. My French is 1980s teenager French. My French friends pay me out regularly about it. I go back to France and interact with them and like, dudes, you know, we don't say that anymore. That's been like 30 years, you're 30 years too old. Yeah, there you go.
22:43 Speaker 2
That's one of the many rich dimensions of language users that we have in the Australian community is that depending on when people first came to Australia, they bring a language that was spoken at the time. This country is an incredible repository for mapping different historical periods in language use and as we know language changes all the time. So just from the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, the ways in which language has changed can be studied and mapped through the wealth of human resources we have in our Australian community. I think it's something we should be proud of and we should shout from the rooftops myself.
Speaker 3
I agree with you and I mean it's another example of life being fluid. Language certainly evolves.
Speaker 2
Now I'm going to ask one more question before the end of the program and we said in the introduction that you've had 20 years of experience in community radio as a broadcaster, trainer and advocate. What do you love about community radio?
Speaker 3
Oh my goodness, what don't I love about it? I think first and foremost, above it all, I love the abling factor of community radio. Community radio uses the power of the media. OK, media is a very, very powerful tool.
Speaker 3
And it's very clear if you just look at the acquisitions from big, powerful corporations and individuals who are so eager to get their hands on any type of media they can that really demonstrates how powerful a tool it is to sort of share your views and sort of disseminate your perspective. What community radio does is that it gives that tool to the underrepresented, to the powerless, to the people who don't have those massive corporate means to share the perspective. So it opens the world to that other perspective.
And I think, you know, if like me, you believe in a diverse and inclusive society, which is what it is anyway, whether you like it or not, society is diverse. You just need to walk around a little bit and talk to people. You will find that everybody is different. And there are so many different perspectives and so many different ways of doing things. And so that is just the way it is. And so what community radio does is that it brings back a bit of balance in the media, in the media sphere, as they say, if it wasn't for community radio, we'd hear only the powerful.
And that would be not a good representation of our society. So that's really the beginning of it. I very early I recognised that and I was very attracted to this idea. And I think I got it all. I did it for myself. I used that tool myself first to promote local music. When I was a musician, that was one way to promote my peers and the local music community and sort of make people interested in and showcase the local talents that would otherwise not get any avenue to be exposed to the local public. But then I sort of got the bug of helping out people and finding people who had nothing to do with me or my community or my perspective. Someone completely different and helping them to get a voice and get their voice out there as a thrilling experience.
And that's a non -ending pleasure, of course, because there are so many different people in this world. So every time I get the opportunity to help someone to share their voice, it's a privilege and it's such a rewarding experience. So I just got the bug.
26:33
Speaker 2
That's a fantastic note on which to wrap our conversation. Thank you so much, Guillaume. Our guest on Emerging Writers today was Dr. Guillaume Vetu, our new volunteer coordinator here at Vision Australia Radio in Adelaide.
This program can be heard at the same time each week on Vision Australia Radio, VA Radio Digital, online at VARadio .org and also on Vision Australia Radio Podcasts where you can catch up on earlier episodes. Thanks for listening to this Vision Australia Radio podcast. Don't forget to subscribe on your preferred podcast platform. Visit varadio .org for more. Vision Australia Radio Blindness Low Vision Opportunity
