School of Culture and Communication - Research Publications
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ItemInformation technology as cultural capital( 1998)In this paper we explore the relevance of the concept of cultural capital - understood here as an alternative to the more traditional measures of socio-economic disadvantage - in the context of a discussion of the significance of information technology in contemporary societies.
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ItemMulticulturalism: the politics of cultural diversity( 1998)This paper addresses the proposition that multiculturalism in Australia is not primarily a cultural phenomenon but should be understood, rather, as being framed by local demographico-political considerations, by a set of strategies of nation formation, and by the politics of Asian regionalism. By this I don’t mean that it has no cultural effects, both at the level of high culture and of everyday social interactions, but that it cannot be accounted for in terms of the discourse of cultural attitude with which it is officially described.
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ItemA note on legal semiotics( 1995)It has become a commonplace to think of the law as a textual practice, and analysis of the linguistic specificity of legal discourse would seem a logical way to explore the textual or discursive construction of the juridical real. There are major difficulties, however, with most of the currently employed forms of linguistic analysis of the law.
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ItemTimeshift: technologies of reproduction and intellectual property( 1994)In recent years two factors have significantly affected the underlying conditions for the public circulation of ideas and information. On the one hand, the development of technologies for the electronic reproduction and dissemination of information has in principle made information limitlessly available; on the other hand, the process of legal regulation has, in all Western countries, constructed or affirmed property rights restricting and channelling the use of information. This paper analyses one of the most important recent American cases in intellectual property law, the 1984 Supreme Court majority and minority decisions in Sony vs Universal City Studios. It argues that, in allowing home video recording of off-air programmes and extending or at least upholding the doctrine of fair use, the Court’s decision nevertheless fails to challenge the philosophical contradictions in intellectual property doctrine which have allowed the progressive encroachment of private property rights on the public domain.
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ItemMichel de Certeau and the practice of representation( 1991)Michel de Certeau’s work, particularly the ethnography of everyday practices developed Arts de faire I and II, has been extensively appropriated in recent years by English-speaking theorists of popular culture. The appropriation has been rather selective, ignoring much of de Certeau’s output in, for example, sociology, history, and literary criticism. More to my point, it has taken from de Certeau a model of the popular which is at once powerful and simple, and which I therefore propose to treat in this paper both with respect and theoretical caution.
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ItemKnowledge and class( 1993)The work of intellectuals is the implementation of modernity. By ‘intellectuals’ I do not mean the ‘traditional’ or ‘high’ intelligentsia: the small elite of men and women of letters who act as public spokespersons for the ‘noble’ disciplines of knowledge (philosophy, the arts, the social sciences, the higher natural sciences). Rather, following Gramsci, I mean all of those whose work is socially defined as being based upon the possession and exercise of knowledge, whether that knowledge be prestigious or routine, technical or speculative. (This definition will be made more precise in the course of this essay.) Unless this broader and socially relational categorization is adopted, it seems to me that any account of the stratum or class of intellectuals can only be a moralizing exercise in self-hatred and self-idealization.
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ItemJoking in China( 1999)In the northern-hemisphere summer of 1998 I went to my first conference in China. Like most of the others attending I flew in to Beijing, but two friends came by way of the old silk road through Pakistan, Nepal and western China. The idea of that trip catches something of the mythical dimension of any journey to the Middle Kingdom: although the academic circuits have been open since the early 1980s, and the carpetbaggers have descended in droves on Shanghai, there's still a sense, pure orientalism as it may be, of entering a closed world. Nor was that sense untrue to my experience of talking and listening to Chinese academics and students. For a start, there's a feeling of risk: 'contact with foreigners' is a privilege and a danger, and tongues are guarded. But the greater closure is the more mundane matter of cultural difference. How do you tell a joke to a Chinese audience? It's hard enough doing it in your own culture. How do you tell a joke to an audience of Chinese, diasporic Chinese, European, North American and Australian intellectuals? The fact that it's not impossible, that people laugh and even seem to get it, is an encouraging sign. Cultures are permeable; human history has always been about negotiation across boundaries and languages and apparently incompatible frames of reference. In Beijing, nevertheless, it was hard work.
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ItemYouth attitudes to the arts( 1990/91)Summary: The study was organised in two parts. The first involved a survey of representations of the arts and of creative activities in television programmes with high ratings for the target age-group, and in magazines oriented to a teenage market. The second, which was based on the initial findings, involved discussions held in a number of focus groups about perceptions of and processes of everyday familiarity with arts activities. In both stages of the study we worked with a deliberately open conception of the key categories, ‘youth’ and ‘the arts’. We posited that the category ‘youth’ was strongly differentiated in terms of age, class, and gender, and much of our analysis was devoted to this internal differentiation and to its correlation with attitudinal variations. In the case of the category of ‘the arts’, we worked with inclusive criteria in order to get at the full range of activities which might count as in some sense aesthetic, and we paid particular attention to the presence or absence of normative aesthetic criteria: that is, we were concerned both with establishing the spectrum of activities engaged in and with the frameworks by which this spectrum was articulated and organised.
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ItemMetacapital: a response to Pierre Bourdieu( 1998)Let me begin with a general statement that I take to hold good within each of the diverse forms of the nation state in the advanced capitalist world. No form of cultural production or circulation within this sphere, I argue, lies beyond the reach of the regulatory activity of state; and any "oppositional" mode of cultural production and circulation, without exception, has as its condition of possibility the play between capital investment and state regulation.
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ItemMeasure for measure: a response to Steven Mailloux( 1996)Steven Mailloux tells two stories from Foucault about the birth of truth in the ‘historical division’ between an older, performative mode of truth-telling and a mode of truth based in the claim to separateness from untruth. The first story is taken from Foucault’s inaugural lecture at the College de France, ‘The order of discourse’, the second from a summary of a lecture series published in English as ‘History of systems of thought’. My response is focused on a conflict over the interpretation of these stories.