School of Culture and Communication - Research Publications
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ItemTelevision: presenting the memory machine( 1987)This essay situates developments in contemporary television in relation to the dominant social relations of time. It argues that time is a perpetual ‘problem’ for television, extending beyond the terms of configuring narrative formats and strategies of visual reflexivity, and instead indicating deeper epistemological and existential issues. While contemporary television programming often seems driven by a desire to give viewers the immediacy of a perpetual ‘now’, this creates a series of increasingly intense contradictions concerning the social experience of time and the functioning of memory.
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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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ItemAccounting for tastes: some problems in Bourdieu's sociology of culture( 1987)Pierre Bourdieu's Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste completes what is perhaps the strongest case we have about the social functions of cultural artefacts; but it is a case that is deeply flawed. In this article I try to isolate some of the theoretical presuppositions and implications of its central concepts, and to clarify their political limitations.
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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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ItemFormal Method in Discourse Analysis( 1989)Developing a workable method of discourse analysis matters, presumably, and if it does, because it would allow us to demonstrate the play of power in language, the play of ideology. To demonstrate means being able to substantiate arguments in the public arena – to politicians, in courts of law, in hospitals or prisons or museums. What we envisage is something like the possibility of proof. We envisage, not a political process of judgement, but procedures of demonstration which could be mechanically repeated to produce identical results, and so bear witness to the underlying structure which causes them. Discourse analysis, like other uncertain knowledges, aspires to a state of hardness. My tone of irony covers a real ambivalence about this project, these projects, and certainly I intend no easy dismissal of them. Here I want to raise a series of questions about some of the work being done in and around the Dutch Konteksten series, especially by Tony Hak and Brian Torode;1 and to see whether it might be possible to define some of the limits touched by this raw, exploratory, interesting work. This is not, even in the case of individual writers, a unified body of research, but it has certain common points of reference. One of them is the ethnomethodological conversation analysis of Sacks and Schegloff; the other, more properly linguistic, is the work of Michel Pêcheux, and to a certain extent the analytic methods of Zellig Harris. The attraction of Pêcheux’s work is, I think, that it promises a rigorous and quasigrammatical account of presupposition: that is, the concept of the preconstructed promises direct access to ideology insofar as it appears to be equivalent to the Gramscian categories of 'common sense' – the obvious, the unthought, the taken-for-granted; and insofar as it both embodies these in a particular grammatical construction and relates them to a particular process of subject formation.
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ItemDivers observations on Australians: a historical library( 1988)Now we confront the five reference volumes of Australians: A Historical Library. These books’ very appearance suggests authority: they are weighty, dignified; they fall open without disintegrating; their typography is conservative but highly legible. They’re real books, as opposed to the cheap paperbacks that have perforce become our staple diet. At the same time, they are pitched towards a non-specialist audience. The language is fairly straightforward and they are heavily illustrated, with generous use of colour. Given the ‘slice’ approach adopted in other volumes of this ‘library’, these reference volumes bear a particular load: they have to provide a readily accessible ‘quick fix’ of basic information that will at least fill in the topography of the rest of the cake. To be blunt, taken as a whole they don’t discharge the responsibility very well. While they contain a mass of useful information and embody a lot of good work by a lot of good historians, as a set of reference volumes they have many inadequacies and inconsistencies.
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ItemA re-division of labour: Victoria's Wages Boards in action( 1987)With the 1896 Factories and Shops Act, the Victorian legislature took a pioneering step towards wage regulation in manufacturing industry. The new Act established six Wages Boards to cover furniture-making, baking, bootmaking and three branches of the clothing trades. Each Board was to comprise equal numbers of employer and employee representatives under a ‘neutral’ chairman with a casting vote, and each was equipped with power to specify mandatory minimum wage levels and the proportions of learners to be employed in its trade. As is well known, the measure was less the brainchild of the labour movement than of the liberal Christian small-bourgeois and professionals of the Anti-Sweating League. The liberal anti-sweaters had a restricted vision of the prevailing economic crisis. They sought particularist, moralistic explanations for the misery engulfing the working class in the 1890s, and fashioned their legislation accordingly. They attributed the near-universal erosion of wage standards to the greed of a small number of unscrupulous employers who had taken advantage of the glut of labour to reduce wages, undercutting the business of the respectable majority and eventually compelling them to follow suit. The solution seemed straightforward: the state should provide a neutral ground on which employers and employees could meet and, through collective bargaining, formulate a common attack on the unscrupulous minority. Only the sweaters would suffer: wages would rise, the domestic market would revive, profits and employment would increase, and all men of good will would prosper.
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ItemRepetition and limitation: computer software and Copyright Law( 1988)The recent evolution of copyright law in the United States is particularly rich in contradictions because of the pressure exerted by new information technologies and by the requirements of an information economy - that is, an economy based in the progressive commodification of information. In so far as this process is mediated through the law relating to intellectual property, it exacerbates the contradiction between the principles of limited monopoly rights and the public availability of ideas.
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ItemSome versions of Foucault: part 2( 1988)In spite of its debt to structuralism, Foucault’s early work may be said to be prestructuralist in one important sense. Whereas one of the central tenets of French structuralism is that energy is an effect of structure, one strand of Foucault’s work up to The Archaeology of Knowledge posits energy and structure as being in a relation of antagonistic opposition: the category of energy is understood, in the framework of a romantic and libertarian tradition deriving from Nietzsche and Bataille, as transgression, as that which subverts structure (but covertly, of course, this also sets up a relation of dependence between the two). This understanding flows fairly directly into an anarchist politics of transgression. This opposition, or something like it, structures John Rajchman’s version of the development of Foucault’s work. Michel Foucault: The Freedom of Philosophy maps Foucault’s course from a romantic literary modernism centred on the experience of language and of madness to a historical nominalism that ceases to privilege literary discourse.
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ItemSome versions of Foucault: part 1( 1988)This essay began as a review of David Hoy's anthology on Foucault, but after reading it I decided that it might be useful to try to cover some of the other recent critical material. The Foucault industry is burgeoning: I read everything I could get hold of in English, but there are doubtless books I've missed, and doubtless others will have come on to the market since this review was completed. With the exception of Habermas's two essays in Der Philosophische Diskurs der Moderne (which shouldshortly be available in translation) I decided to ignore foreign language materials - including, for example, the Foucault issue of Critique and Deleuze's recent collection of essays. Some of the books on Foucault can quickly be discarded. One of the worst is J.G. Merquior's Foucault, in the Modern Masters series. Merquior's book makes a token effort to be fair to his Modern Master but then quickly yields to antipathy; it is not much more than a display of prejudice - about "Paris" and its "fashions", about European philosophy in general (Merquior characterizes everything from Bergson on as 'literary', a term of abuse which assumes unproblematic genre distinctions), about historical method (which has to do essentially with factual correctness), and about the assault on liberal values that Foucault's work is supposed to represent. The import of Foucault's oeuvre is said to be nihilistic; it is hostile to the Enlightenment; it denigrates the rule of Reason. All of this is written in a rollicking polemical style; it's all either untrue or ungenerous; and it's a depressing demonstration of how easy it is, in one's irritation with some aspect of Foucault's work, not to listen to what he is saying.