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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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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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.