School of Culture and Communication - Research Publications
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ItemEditorial introduction: A creative life( 2006)In seeking authors who might address the relationship between the notions of philosophy and of creativity, the call for papers for this special issue of Angelaki invited consideration of the physical terms of each of these pursuits – philosophy and creative invention. The daily praxes of individual authorial and artistic pursuits are what have drawn us close to these selected texts. Individual authors’ obsessions and obsessive interests highlight the immense variation in how aesthetics operates as a determinant mode for those individuals and the communities with which they choose to engage.
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ItemTechnology( 2006)This essay traces the increased centrality of technology to social life across the period of modernity. It examines major shifts in thinking about technology which underpin the shift from industrial to post-industrial society, and the emergence of concepts such as ‘technoscience’ and ‘technoculture’. It argues that a critical analysis of technology must analyse the way that histories of technological progress have been implicated in colonial hierarchies privileging the West. In examining the extension of technology from machines that make things to ‘machines that think’, including biotechnology and computerized ‘artificial life’, something implied in every historical iteration of technology is laid bare: defining the technological activates the border between nature and culture, and goes to the heart of what it means to be human.
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ItemLibrary(Sage, 2006)The modern library derives from a vision of public service developed in the 19th century. At various times in the past a commercial service, an educational resource, a religious domain and a political institution, the library today exists in various forms, including all these but in addition the professional libraries held by law firms and scientific or technological associations, multimedia lending libraries and certain areas of the world-wide web.
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ItemThe decline of the literary paradigm in Australian publishing(Giramondo Publishing, 2006-08)Bestseller lists are of fundamental symbolic importance to the publishing industry. They show not only what is selling, but how the industry sees itself. In their margins are written not only the tastes of readers, but the aspirations of publishers, the pretensions of authors, and the topography of the market. Until the late 1990s in Australia such lists were generally compiled by the literary editors of major daily newspapers and literary magazines, who contacted booksellers and asked what was selling. Such lists were notoriously filtered. Those contacted were most often independents in inner-city locations, close to universities. Genre fiction would routinely be omitted from their quick, usually anecdotal, assessment of what was moving in the shop, along with any non-fiction deemed lowbrow and unbecoming, such as The Guinness Book of Records, a perennial bestseller in almost all bookshops. Instead, such lists were comprised almost entirely of literary fiction and literary non-fiction.
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ItemComing home to the land( 2006)A version of this essay appeared as Leslie, D. (2006). Coming home to the land. Eureka Street, March-April, 30-31.This essay is a tribute to artist Lin Onus. It explores and assesses his artistic legacy as a journey into a healing land; a place of refuge and Aboriginal tradition which encourages empathy. Onus’s painting is contemplated for the inspiration it presents, not only in regard to increased understanding of Aboriginal and cross-cultural Australian histories, but to the medium of painting as a way of bridging the cultural gap and transcending the limitations of history.
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ItemLiquid space and time( 2006)This article theorises the effects of the mobile phone phenomenon upon the spatial and temporal dynamics of everyday life. It contends that more than any other connectable networkable device, the mobile phone transforms the experience of space and time for individuals and collectivities. Moreover, its importance seems set to become even more central as it rapidly transforms from simple voice-carrier to powerful communicating device that will allow the transmission and reception of increasingly rich data that includes video, Internet and data-processing uses. This transformation, I argue, serves to liquify time and space. The mobile phone, as a part of an array of networkable devices and applications that make up the ‘network society’, brings what David Harvey calls ‘space-time’ compression to new levels of intensity. In so doing it is shaping a new form of subjectivity – a ‘virtual self’ – that has the potential to either trap or liberate.
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ItemThe I, the eye and the orifice: an interview with Catherine Millet( 2006)The position of a woman as the object at a male orgy has always been a presence signifying only as orifice; a site without subjectivity around which male pleasure is organised and virility enacted for the gaze of other men. But what happens if the focal point shifts? If in lieu of this psychasthenia the body of a woman in an orgy becomes the focal point around which space is organised? And what if the woman then gives voice to this focal point articulating both its gaze and its pleasures? Catherine Millet makes such a shift in her sexual autobiography The Sexual Life of Catherine M., but critical responses to the text have shown little interest in the books re-spatialisation of sexual relations.
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ItemAustralian election slogans, 1949-2004: where political marketing meets political rhetoric( 2006)The development of election slogans in Australia over the past five decades reveals much about how electioneering practice and political rhetoric have changed. In the 1940s and 1950s, election campaigns were short-term, ad hoc, and localised, and slogans were used only sporadically but with increased professionalisation. From the 1960s to the 1980s, political parties began using official campaign slogans in a far more disciplined and centralised manner. By the late 1990s, the Labor and Liberal parties were developing slogans through a process of intensive market research. Although originally spoken, shouted or sung, campaign strategists have adapted slogans to new forms of media and technology.
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ItemThe promethean artist: from thief, via metaphysical rebel, to cliché( 2006)It has become a commonplace, a cliché in fact, to call a great artist ‘Promethean’, after the Greek mythological figure that stole fire from the gods and was punished by being fastened to a rock in the wilderness. Zeus’ eagle then pecked out his (forever renewable) liver every day for thousands of years. But how did Prometheus, who in the earliest accounts in Hesiod was portrayed as a wily thief,become the symbol of creative genius with a distinctly rebellious edge? Prometheus was associated with pottery and sculpture in antiquity. Lucian of Samosata may have been the earliest to make the direct connection between Prometheus and poetry. The notion of the Promethean artist was brought to its apotheosis by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1774–1832) who, at least in his younger days, saw himself as Prometheus, and was called ‘Prometheus-Goethe’ by a friend. Goethe’s ‘Prometheus’ works also incorporate a strong doseof metaphysical rebellion, despite his ongoing belief in divinity. By the time we reach Nietzsche, the Promethean individual, for whom life is an aesthetic construct, embodies a ‘necessary sacrilege’ against the gods. During the twentieth century, the metaphysical and symbolic credentials of the Promethean artist empty out into a Romantic commonplace. How did we get from Hesiod, to Nietzsche, to cliché? This article traces the genealogy of this transformation from a quasicomic thief to creative genius and rebel, and argues that Nietzsche’s use of the inherently metaphysical Prometheus in The Birth of Tragedyparadoxically hastened the Titan’s fall into empty topos.
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ItemModernity, modernism and the contemporary(Sage Publications, 2006-05)At the beginning of the 20th century, artists responded to the changes in the modern city with a mix of awe and excitement. Modernity was ushered in by the power of new industrial technologies. Modernism, as the cultural representation of modernity, promised to break from traditions that restricted creativity and embrace the spirit of progress.