School of Culture and Communication - Research Publications
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Itemlntertextuality and ontology(Manchester University Press, 1990)The concept of intertextuality requires that we understand the concept of text not as a self-contained structure but as differential and historical. Texts are shaped not by an immanent time but by the play of divergent temporalities. Texts are therefore not structures of presence but traces and tracings of otherness. They are shaped by the repetition and the transformation of other textual structures. These absent textual structures at once constrain the text and are represented by and within it; they are at once preconditions and moments of the text.
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ItemLiterature as regime (meditations on an emergence)(Manchester University Press, 2002)At the beginning of Joseph Roth’s novel The Radetzky March a young infantry lieutenant, seeing the Emperor accidentally put himself in danger in the course of the battle of Solferino, pushes him to the ground and receives the bullet intended for the Supreme War Lord. Many years later, now a captain and ennobled, Joseph Trotta finds in his son’s school reader an account of this incident.
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ItemRecovering memory( 1996)To speak of memory as tekhne, to deny that it has an unmediated relation to experience, is to say that the logic of textuality by which memory is structured has technological and institutional conditions of existence. Let me illustrate the enabling conditions of the ‘textual’ logic of memory by reference to the controversy over recovered memories of childhood sexual abuse.
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ItemLiterature, culture, mirrors( 1997)John Frow responds to Simon During Simon During proposes – as I read it – six sets of reasons for the shift within departments of English from traditional literary studies towards cultural studies. The first is the academic appropriation of a tradition of Romantic anti-academicism stretching from Wordsworth to Dada. The second is a new mode of subject formation by which students are trained as consumers of cultural goods. The third is the valorization of social identities perceived as marginal within a traditional academic framework. The fourth is the development of new regimes of student choice, reflected in changed patterns of enrolment. The fifth is the emergence of a policy framework designed to enhance national economic competitiveness. The sixth is a regime of training which prepares students for jobs in the cultural sector.
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ItemA politics of stolen time( 1998)This is a story about acts of telling that are true and acts that are false. It is about being told things and not being heard. It is about the relation between telling stories and existing, or about being made not to exist. Millicent’s story is a part of the Report of the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families, entitled Bringing Them Home. Delivered to the Australian Federal Government in 1997, the Report is a record of the history of forcible removal of indigenous children, usually of mixed descent, from their families and communities, and it makes recommendations about current laws, practices and policies, about compensation for the victims of past laws, practices and policies, and about the services that are or should be available for those victims.
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ItemAustralian cultural studies: theory, story, history( 2005)In a forthcoming paper on the History of Theory Ian Hunter calls for a space for historical reflection on the so-called ‘moment of theory’, and goes on to describe his argument as being indicative of ‘a particular way of undertaking intellectual history’. Let me posit, perhaps against the grain of Ian’s intentions, that ‘historical reflection’ and ‘intellectual history’ constitute distinct sub-sets of the history of philosophy. Historical reflection, which is central to the Hegelian critique of the self-becoming of philosophy, is excluded from contemporary analytic philosophy by its rigorous refusal of historical time as the condition or context of thought. Intellectual history is what is then left over when the history of philosophy is disconnected from the space in which philosophy actually happens, and in that sense is quite different from the historical reflection in which a past is connected, with whatever discontinuities and complexities, to the present that reflects on it. Intellectual history is histoire; historical reflection is discours.
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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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ItemSocial Class and Cultural Practice in Contemporary Australia(Cambridge University Press, 2001)
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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.