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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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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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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ItemCultural studies and the neoliberal imagination( 1999)What remains of the liberal vision of a common public culture in a world of asserted differences? What mechanisms of consenting or dissenting identification sustain a democratic public sphere when politics becomes spectacular? And isn’t the representation of publicness always the performance of a division, an exclusion, a minoritization? In order to put the issues that I think are at stake in these questions as pointedly as I can, let me take as a brief example the rhetoric deployed in Australia at the moment by a politician called Pauline Hanson. Hanson is a right-wing populist in the mould of Le Pen, appealing to a broad working-class and rural constituency who have been damaged, and feel damaged, by the downsizing effects of globalization, by the decline of the rural sector, and by what they perceive to be favorable treatment given to indigenous and immigrant Australians. Her politics of grievance is expressed most economically in two statements: “All Australians should be equal,” and “All Australians should speak English.” The first of these statements means: “Indigenous people should not claim a separate cultural identity, nor the separate forms of political and economic recognition that might flow from it.” The second (which has its American counterparts in, for example, the Californian legislation deeming English to be the sole language of official business) means: “Asian migrants are not welcome in this country because they steal jobs from white people.” These are demands for cultural commonality and for shared civic values; they are at once perfectly reasonable and deeply racist. Note, however, that their illiberal force is expressed in the language of Enlightenment civility: the principles of the equality of citizens, of resistance to privilege, of the rule of law, of civic responsibility. To make this point is not to condemn that language but to say that its uses are always strategic, positional, overdetermined by the secondary codes that translate it for particular knowing audiences.
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ItemClass, education, culture( 1997)Initiated in 1992, the Australian Cultural Consumption project is a large, survey-based analysis of cultural taste across a wide range of areas, including not just the obviously 'cultural' ones like consumption of film and television and radio, or concert and museum attendance, but also such things as likes and dislikes in furniture, in cars and in clothing; participation in sports or in gambling or in a large number of formal and informal leisure activities; and the ways in which friendships are formed and maintained.
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ItemA note on the everyday( 1998)"The everyday" is a concept that has been widely used in recent years as a way of focussing on the sedimented "background" orders governing routinized behaviour. Its philosophical roots lie in Alfred Schutz's development of Edmund Husserl's concept of the Lebenwelt; in psychological conceptions of cognitive schematization; in the sociological frameworks developed by Henri Lefebvre, Pierre Bourdieu and Michel de Certeau in France, and by Erving Goffman and Harold Garfinkel in the US, to deal with the micrologics of social behaviour; and in the converging interests of cultural history, cultural studies, and some strands of cultural anthropology in the organization of everyday experience.