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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ItemBeyond the disciplines: cultural studies(Australian Academy of the Humanities, 1992)Paper from the Australian Academy of the Humanities Symposium 1991. Today’s Symposium looks in one way like an invitation to a younger generation to display its wares, with perhaps a suggestion that the bright new ones are to be displayed as an alternative to the old and somewhat tarnished ones. At the same time, however, it would seem that the wares of being displayed as a range of alternatives to each other other, since it is likely that in these times of economic and spiritual recession the discriminating buyer will not be able to afford the lot. That is to say that the structure of the Symposium implies a degree of arbitrariness, as though the new wares were distinguished from the old only by their novelty, their fashion value. I want to argue that this is not the case: that there is a logic to the development of new disciplinary structures such as Cultural Studies out of the old ones, and that what we are concerned with here is the normal process of formation and reformation of the discipline of literary studies in response to real intellectual and social pressures: not with scattering of a coherent discipline into incoherence.
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ItemCultural markets and the shape of culture(Local Consumption Publications, 1993)The second half of Kafka's story ‘The Great Wall of China’ (Kafka 1971) is concerned with 'one of the most obscure of our institutions', the empire itself. Its obscurity is linked to its spatial extent: 'so vast is our land that no fable can do justice to its vastness, the heavens can barely span it-and Peking is only a dot in it, and the imperial palace is less than a dot'. This overwhelming power of distance directly affects what the people know about the Emperor: certainly he is venerated, even worshipped; but it is not clear which Emperor this is, for 'how should we know anything about that-thousands of miles away in the south-almost on the borders of the Tibetan Highlands? And besides, any tidings, even if they did reach us, would arrive far too late, would have become obsolete long before they reached us'.
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ItemThe subject of the law(Local Consumption Publications, 1987)This paper is part of a larger piece of work on juridical discourse in which I try to elaborate a general description of the discursive and interdiscursive structures of the law and to specify some of the central doctrinal categories of contemporary law. The category of legal subject has an exemplary status in such a project for a number of reasons: it is constructed, in historically differential ways, through a diversity of overlapping positions in legal and para-legal practices and languages; it covers both human and non-human entities; it. is formed in direct relation to the juridical/economic concept of property; and it is closely linked, as both foundation and effect, to the philosophical category of subject. My account here is necessarily cursory, but it should be apparent that it has implications, in part, for the broader debate that has taken place in recent years around the concept of the subject.
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ItemA semiotics of the token economy(Local Consumption Publications, 1985)Too hasty a reading of Donzelot and Castel would suggest that their analysis can be directly applied to Australia. In at least one important respect this is not the case. The most powerful component of the Australian psy-complex is not psychoanalysis but behavioural psychology, an intellectual system at once grossly banal and extraordinarily influential as the basis of techniques of surveillance (and self-surveillance) and social control. It is the virtually uncontested orthodoxy in tertiary institutions and in professional and paraprofessional practice. In this paper I examine a behaviour modification programme used in a Perth prison (a 'treatment and research centre') for adolescent girls.
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ItemThe signature: three arguments about the commodity of form(Centre for Cultural Research, University of Western Sydney, 1996)My topic is the original, the authentic, the singular: the foundational categories of the work of art. I begin therefore with the unoriginal, the inauthentic, the multiple, and I exemplify them with the most banal and most trivial object I have been able to imagine. Neither simply confectionery nor simply a toy, the Kinder Surprise is a plastic figure or assemblage within a plastic egg within a chocolate egg: a 'surprise' for 'children'. These figures, something like what you might find in an expensive Christmas cracker, might he a vintage car, reproduced in faithful detail: a character from The Flintstones or Peanuts; a smurf, an elf, a cartoon cow; it might be a toucan with a gleaming blue plastic body and large scrolled wings in brilliant colours; it might be a miniature nickelodeon with a few frames of film, a wagon drawn by horses, a seal with a cavity in its body that holds small pieces of crayon, a kaleidoscope, a tortoise, a model plane. Behind each of these figures stands the almost infinite seriality of mass production: four hundred million eggs a year, hundreds of thousands and perhaps millions of each figure surprising someone at every moment of every day throughout the world. At the same time, distinct sub-series exist within the totality of objects, and these form the basis of the organisation of the range.
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ItemResponse to Michael Denning(English Department, University of Melbourne, 1993)Even the most scholarly, the most rigorous of genealogies is a myth of origins making strategic claims about the way things ought to be in the present. I read Michael Denning's proposal of an ancestral strand for US cultural studies in this way: as a claim for the importance of a certain way of theorising race, and - presumably - for the sort of coalition-based politics that it would support; as a valorisation of the work of Balibar and Wallerstein; and perhaps - but here I'm less certain - as an attempt to redeem something from the aesthetics and the cultural theory of the Popular Front.
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ItemReading as system and as practice(Cambridge University Press, 1983)My concern in this paper is with the elaboration of a Marxist theory of reading, and this reminder of the many and often contradictory roles of the god is intended to serve as a warning against the confusion of determinacy with determinism or the setting of interpretative sanctions.
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ItemWhat was postmodernism?(University of Calgary Press, 1990)The concepts of the post-colonial and the post-modern are perhaps most consistently defined in terms of their difference from and their difficult and ambivalent resistance to modernity. It is a logic of periodization that ties them together, or more precisely a logic of anti-periodization, defining them emptily through a retrospective negation. Even so open-ended and paradoxical a conception of period, however (the "post"), runs the usual dangers: of reducing a disparate set of political or cultural circumstances to a more or less unified temporality with an ultimately spiritual essence. My concern in this paper is primarily with the concept of the post-modern, but the moral is meant to apply more broadly.