School of Culture and Communication - Research Publications
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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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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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ItemWhen historic time meets Julia Kristeva’s women’s time: the reception of Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party in Australia( 2008)One of the first visual arts events of the 1988 bicentennial year was the staging of The Dinner Party (1979), a monumental artwork by the North American artist Judy Chicago at the Melbourne Exhibition Buildings. Completed in 1979, The Dinner Party has become emblematic of a particular form of feminist art practice: namely that which makes visible the body of women in both a literal and metaphoric sense. An enormous installation, The Dinner Party is a triangular table setting at which places are laid for the women that are missing from conventional historic narratives. The place settings include elaborate crockery with each plate adopting vaginal imagery that evokes particular characteristics of each woman's historic contribution.While attracting extremely high visitor numbers whenever the work is exhibited, the artwork itself has been widely criticised. The Melbourne exhibition of this work was no exception. However on this occasion there was an added dimension to the criticism: a parochial resistance to the importation of a foreign artwork. In this paper I explore this specific instance of border crossing in feminist art practice, and the claims made by many Australian art critics that superior work was being produced by local women artists. These arguments involved assertions that The Dinner Party’s visual aesthetic was dated, that Australian artists had adopted a similar imagery prior to Chicago and that whatever impact the work might have had in 1979, by 1988 it could only be regarded as a relic.
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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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ItemThe Jew's two noses: Freud, cocaine, addiction( 2001)Recently there have been a number of authorities who - from the inside of psychoanalysis itself - have suggested that the most forceful threat to psychoanalysis as a clinical practice is the present efflorescence and dominance of drug-based psychotherapies. Indeed, the astonishing public success of a physician such as Oliver Sacks - whose entire career would have been impossible without his illegal pharmaceutical experimentation upon uniformed patients in the guise of authentic Hippocratic care - can stand as a particularly chilling index of just such a crisis: the case study, a genre which Freud is often said to have invented, and to which he certainly gave the decisive impetus, has become in Sacks’ hands an unreflective celebration of the radiant sovereign power that legal access to, and distribution rights over, synthesized psychoactive substances can bequeath to the duly-authorised representatives of the pharmaco-medical institution. Sacks aside, John Forrester characterizes this shift thus ;the introduction of the psychotropic drugs in the 1950s, a new generation of tranquilizers shortly after (Librium, Valium), the anti-depressants of the 1960s and 1970s, and the mood-altering drugs of the 1980s, has entailed a significant shift in the practice of psychiatry. Yes, the new psychiatry went hand in hand with a shift of theoretical focus from psychological and psychoanalytical theories to neurological and psychopharmacological concerns’. His analysis has been echoed by other major psychoanalytic theorist-practitioners, such as Bruce Fink, Elie Ragland and Elisabeth Roudinesco, all of whom naturally deplore this situation, even if their condemnations take different forms, and identify different causes.
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ItemIntroduction(Cambridge University Press, 1997)As a collection of British colonies and then a nation, Australia came into existence as a product of both colonialism and modernity; proud of its fancied youth and eager for the fruits of civilisation, enamoured with progress yet yearning for tradition. Historical accounts of Australia have equally been products of colonialism and modernity. More often than not, the mission of history has been to remember the triumph of colonising a continent and forming a modern nation state with destiny on its side. While the historical legacies of colonialism and modernity remain palpable, many of the dreams of colonialism and modernity lie in ruins. This is a book from these 'ruins' in the sense that it discusses both the colonial past of former colonies and the colonising of indigenous people in Australia. But ruins are never simply gone or in the past; ruins are enduring traces; spaces of romantic fancies and forgetfulness where social memories imagine the persistence of time in records of destruction. Thus this book is about the past in the present, it is written from within contemporary cultures of history. It moves from Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal accounts of Captain Cook, jumps to the installation of history in museums and school curricula, glides through the historiography of archetypal historical events. This is a book with strong hopes for history and social memory. My interest is not in hammering home the constructedness of history, nor in the important task of diversifying and proliferating accounts of neglected historical actors but in thinking historically about existing social memory. It is a gesture towards learning to inhabit landscapes of memory which are, in part, landscapes littered with ruins; some archaic and others nightmarish, some quaint simulations and others desperate echoes. I imagine such a landscape of memories not as homeless place for lost souls but a ground from which new flights of historical imagination might depart and to which they might return, differently.
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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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ItemExperiments in culture: an introduction(Monash University ePress, 2006)The last two decades have witnessed an explosion in the development of new public and private museums throughout the world. If this is surprising it is only because, for much of the last 50 years, museums have been regarded by many scholars and cultural critics as, if not extinct, then certainly archaic institutions far from the cutting edge of cultural innovation. This judgment is being proved wrong across the globe as innovative and distinctive museums are staking out new territory for themselves as vital, dynamic, public and civic cultural institutions. Nowhere is this most striking than in the South Pacific where large, new or significantly expanded public museums and cultural centres have opened since the 1990s, including the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, the National Museum of Australia, the Melbourne Museum, Australian Centre for the Moving Image, the Museum of Sydney, the Gab Titui Cultural Centre in the Torres Strait, the Centre Culturel Tjibaou and the Vanuatu Cultural Centre. Many more museums in that region have undertaken major renovations. South Pacific museums: Experiments in culture brings together a collection of outstanding analysis of these museums by cultural, museum and architectural critics, and historians. A series of snapshots introduces the reader to key museums in the region while the essays explore these museum developments in the broadest possible terms. The museums under analysis are part of the complex field of heritage, where national economies meet global tourism, where cities brand themselves, where indigeneity articulates with colonialism, where exhibitionary technologies and pedagogies meet entertainment, where histories are fought over, where local identities intersect with academic and popular knowledge, where objects and provenance are displayed and contested, where remembering and forgetting dance their endless dance.
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ItemRethinking the performance of Brecht: lines of flight, becoming and the female subject( 2000)This essay brings together a number of related but frequently separated discourses around the themes of performance, gender and Epic theatre within the frame of a feminist analysis of theatrical performance. It maps the possibilities of exchange across the borders of specific practices and their discourses in an effort to think about the productive value of border-crossing. I model this crossing-of-borders on a reading of the text and performance of Bertolt Brecht' s modernist classic, The Good Person of Sichuan, in which the theatrical notion of performance is examined through a feminist application of the Deleuzian concept of becoming. The Deleuzian analysis of Brecht adds a new dimension to performance analysis and helps to revise and historicise Brecht' s politics for a contemporary public. This task is an important one for Brecht is worth doing still. He returned to the Australian stage in 1998 and 1999 in two contrast ing productions - the true-to-Brecht Melbourne Theatre Company production of The Resistable Rise ofArturo Ui, directed by Simon Phillips and the 'renovated' Belvoir St. Theatre (Sydney) production of Caucasian Chalk Circle, directed by Michael Kantor - suggesting that a revival of interest in political theatre position s itself through a relation to Brechtian theatre. Finding a productive way forward for Brechtian theatre is crucial to the avoidance of the pitfalls that negate the cultural critique that the plays make possible.
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ItemFrom glass architecture to big brother: scenes from a cultural history of transparency( 2003)The recent international popularity of the Big Brother television franchise has highlighted some of the ways in which concepts of public and private space are being transformed in contemporary culture. The fact that the primary scene of action in Big Brother is a hybrid television studio fashioned as a domestic dwelling - a 'home' in which people live which being watched by others - brings into focus many issues raised by the increeasing mediatisation of what was formerly private space. In this sense, Big Brother forms a lighting rod from the ambivalent hopes and ambient fears produced by social and technological changes which have given new impetus to the modernist dream of the transparent society. In this essay, I want to reposition the Big Brother phenomenon in the context of an ealier debate about domestic space which occurred during the emergence of architectural modernism in the first decades of the twentieth century. At issue then was the physical construction of the home, particularly through the increasing use of glass as a design element. While glass architecture is even more prevalent in the persent, its spatial impact - particularly in terms of its capacity to alter the relationship between the 'inside' and the 'outside' - has now been matched or exceeded in many respects by the effects of electronic media. By tracing the parelledl between the unsettling spatial effects produced by both glass consturction and the electronic screen, I will sketch a cultural logic linking the modernist project of architectural transparency to the contemporary repositioning of the home as an interactive media centre. This shift corresponds to the emergence of a social setting in which personal identity is subject to new exigencies. As electronic media have both extended and transformed the spatial effects of glass construction, they have produced significant pressures on both private space and public sphere. Heightened exposure of the personal and the private is creating unpredictable consequences, no least in the public domain.