School of Culture and Communication - Research Publications
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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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ItemPublic domain and the new world order in knowledge( 2000)The General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, the World Intellectual Property Organization negotiations in 1997 and, currently, the Multilateral Agreement on Investment are the legal instruments for the globalization and deregulation of international trade. My paper focuses on some of their implications for the free circulation of knowledge. For, if the rhetoric of globalization is all about the freeing-up of access to and the removal of regulatory controls from formerly restrictive and protected industries, one of the effects of these new legal regimes has, nevertheless, been to institute increasingly severe restrictions on cultural flows. Common to all of them is the fact that they define knowledge as property, and then seek to map out an appropriate regime of property rights. The restriction of illegal copying of software and of audio- and video-recordings , and the enforcement of patents on biological, agro-chemical and pharmaceutical patents are the leading edge of this new wave of incursions into the public domain that is supposedly protected by intellectual property law; with the extension of patent law to previously exempt areas, with strong moves towards the protection of facts in databases, and with the erosion of fair use exemptions, the very notion of a public domain of knowledge from which writers, artists, scientists and scholars can draw is seriously threatened.
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ItemInvidious distinction: waste, difference, and classy staff( 2001)The concept of waste, or non-ulitarian expenditure, has been central throughout the twentieth century to theories of the values of things. One genealogy would run from Veblen's functionalist account of useless and envy-based social differentiation through to Bourdieu's concept of distinction; another would encompass the anti-functionalist theories of Bataille and Baudrillard. I align myself with the former, since the latter fail fully to break with the insistence of function; I nevertheless seek to retain some of Bataille's emphasis on the gratuitousness of the uses of things. More generally, I oppose a theory of uses, which are productive or supportive of a value relationship between things and kinds of persons, to a theory of consumption and of consumerism; and I seek to theorize the multifunctionality of objects and their irreducibility to social taxonomy.
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ItemGenre worlds: the discursive shaping of knowledge( 2005)The thesis I want to argue in this article is a simple and in some ways rather formalistic one: that textual meaning is carried by formal structures more powerfully than by explicit thematic content; that what texts do and how they are structured have greater force than what they say they are about; and that genre — by which I mean merely the kinds of talking and writing, of imaging and of structured sound — is perhaps the most important of the structures by which texts are organized.
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ItemText, culture, rhetoric: some futures for English( 2001)This is the text of an inaugural lecture given at the University of Edinburgh on 11 May 2000. In his book on character analysis Wilhelm Reich describes character as a kind of armour, a rigid suit that one bolts on and that its wearer then comes to resemble. It’s a metaphor that Jacques Lacan picks up in a phrase about the ‘blazons of phobia’, that ‘talking arms of character’, and it’s one that seems an apt description of these priestly robes that I’m wearing this afternoon. I can think of them only as a sign of office with which I at once pay my respects to the distinguished line of predecessors in this chair, and defend myself by hiding behind the impersonality of the ‘armorial blazoning’ of position.