School of Culture and Communication - Research Publications
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ItemDiscipline and Discipleship( 1988)The transfer of knowledges is almost always mediated by institutions and by authorized persons. I set up some metaphors in this paper to try to examine these mediating processes by which knowledges are both reproduced and transformed. In particular, I take psychoanalytic andreligious training as metaphors for the transmission of a discipline, and then I briefly extend the figure of discipleship to talk about literary pedagogy and the training of graduate students.
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ItemA pebble, a camera, a man who turns into a telegraph pole( 2001)Moving house while I was writing this paper, I have been working in an unusually intense way with physical things: sanding back wooden floors, shifting cartons of books, sealing a window frame with putty, tightening the rings on a washing machine hose . . . Callused on my fingers, this is a kind of knowledge different from intellectual knowing (which is, nevertheless, always a matter of paper and ink and electric currents running through machinery). Old skills of understanding the world with my hands come back to me. And I experience the sheer singularity of its things: this nameless, almost indescribable Odradek of a thing, for example, ample, an asymmetrical grooved and slotted bit of fractionally cylindrical metal that ties two planks of bookshelf together around a projecting, greased metal screw. Someone designed it, gave it its mysteriously precise logic, perhaps even has a name for it; but to me it's purely strange.
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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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ItemThe margins of the law( 1988-02)Text reviewed Roberto Mangabeira Unger, The Critical Legal Studies Movement. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986. 128pp. One of the most powerful current readings of the law is that developed, as an “expansion of doctrine” by Roberto Mangabeira Unger. This reading begins with an acceptance of “the mimimal characteristics of doctrine - the willingness to take the extant authoritative materials as starting points and the claim to normative authority” (15). It accepts the historical givenness of doctrine, that is to say; but then pushes on from there to the point where doctrine crosses over into ideological conflict. This is the reading, in other words, of a “double inscription” it explores the “internal development” (2) of legal categories (for example, the causal categories embedded in notions such as imputed purpose), but it then tries to open this development out into a recognition and a deepening of the clash between contradictory principles. Legal categories are so closely tied in with the structure of the world that to contest them, or to elaborate them to the point of contradiction, is to challenge the naturalness and the necessity of that structure. Such a method of reading derives its political force from its belief that “the focussed disputes of legal doctrine repeatedly threaten to escalate into struggles over the basic imaginative structure of social existence”
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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.