School of Culture and Communication - Theses
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ItemEvolving multilingualisms in poetry: third culture as a window on multilingual poetic praxis( 2011)In this thesis, I compare the understanding and construction of multilingualism across linguistics, cultural studies and literature in an effort to interrogate the popular notion that multilingual individuals – and creative writers in particular – are conflicted and fragmented as a result of their multilingualism. I locate the source of that assumption in the monolingual bias that arose when Western European thinkers adopted the idea that nations should be built around and defined by language. I then trace its development and influence on attitudes towards multilingualism and multilingual expression across disciplines to the present day. In particular, I examine the work of contemporaneous multilingual writers and assess how their work is both shaped by and resists these developing popular and academic conceptions of multilingualism. I identify three distinct types of multilingual writers in the process, who I refer to as traditional multilingual poets, cross culture polyglot poets and third culture polyglot poets. The first write in only one language at a time and do not mix codes, the second combine two languages usually connected through a history of colonialism, switching between them in the body of a single poem, and the third weave three or more languages that may or may not have any colonial history into poetry that is meant to be performed rather than read. I argue that polyglot poetry, particularly third culture poetry, as it is marked by a lack of conflict between the languages, represents a challenge to the dominant monolingual perception of multilingualism. Polyglot poetry reframes the idea of the fractured multilingual as a multifaceted one, with each identity and language representing not a shattered fragment but a new dimension. Creating polyglot poetry, then, is a political act in that it takes a dominant, sometimes colonizing, language, claims ownership of it, and then infuses it with the music of the Other. Rather than see their multifaceted identities as a hindrance to national belonging, I argue that polyglot poets represent a large number of people around the world – multilinguals all – whose identities exist harmoniously across multiple languages and national affiliations. This thesis puts forward a new framework for studying the movement of multilinguals between their languages, and specifically provides a new language for studying highly activated multilinguals.
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ItemBrutal Belonging: affective intensities in, and between, Australia's and Japan's grindcore scenes( 2012)This thesis examines the experience of affective belonging in the grindcore music scene. Presenting an ethnography of how scene-members in Australia and Japan participate in grindcore, my thesis shows the experience of affective belonging in three ways: spatially, socially and through the transnational exchanges between both scenes. My thesis formulates the concept of ‘brutal belonging’ as a metaphor for the intense, sometimes violent, sensation(s) of affective belonging in grindcore, to argue that fans experience belonging via shared affective intensities rather than scenic signifiers. My thesis focuses on how grindcore metal music scene-members in Australia and Japan experience belonging affectively.
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ItemFriendology: the negotiation of intimacy on Facebook( 2012)How does Facebook influence intimacy as it relates to identity and relationships? I answer aspects of this question through a grounded ethnography of Australian Facebook users. Research into social network services has produced a range of disparate concepts, in part due to highly specific quantitative investigations. Though some ethnography has been produced, there remains a need for finegrained, qualitative research. This thesis responds to these issues, combining ethnographic methods with Grounded Theory techniques in order to produce a conceptually rich account of everyday social processes. Six participants were recruited, interviewed multiple times, observed on Facebook, and had their Facebook profile information downloaded. A Grounded Theory was inductively developed in which intimacy, identity and friendship emerged as core concepts. The benefits of this approach are a focus on process and the clarification of ideas through abstraction and conceptualisation, rather than thick description. Facebook influences identity and friendship, I argue, by making intimacy problematic. Interpersonal intimacy is a primary quality which defines friendships, and my participants self‐reflexively perform intimacy on Facebook in order to reproduce their friendships. I conceptualise this endeavour in terms of spatiality and social capital. However, participants encounter a host of sociotechnical contingencies which jeopardise this process. These can negatively affect interpersonal intimacy in a variety of ways. In response, participants develop reflexive techniques to ‘negotiate intimacy’. I give a detailed constructionist account of these, focusing on how participants control spaces, mobilise resources of identification, and develop self‐protecting forms of public, social intimacy. These processes respond to broad problems and describe nascent norms, rather than individual tactics. Hence, I believe they are indicative of a ‘culture of reflexive intimacy’. This is a ‘friend culture’ stemming from changes in the nature of modern relationships which are institutionalised on Facebook. Hence, Facebook is a ‘friendology’, a friendship technology, but also a realm in which the logos of friendship becomes an object of reflexive thought and action. Although the apogee of this thesis cannot capture this culture’s broad structures, I explore how they may emerge through symbolic interactions in a novel socio‐technical environment in respect to a particular cultural group.
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ItemAfter language: Alain Badiou and the linguistic turn( 2011)This thesis aims to explore whether and how theorists in the humanities today can talk about truth and universality after the critical and linguistic turns in philosophy. To approach this problem it examines the work of Alain Badiou, who explicitly seeks a theory of truth which is contemporary with these developments. Whether we are talking about analytic or continental philosophy, language came to dominate philosophical enquiry in the past century. In making the heretofore overlooked or obfuscated link between language and thought apparent, this put into question the nature and limits of reason, the autonomy of the knowing subject, and the representational or realist conception of truth. Moreover, it left in doubt the viability of philosophy itself (outside the perennial or self-effacing investigation of language) insofar as it seemed to rest on the solidity of these very tenets. For Badiou, the outcome of this trajectory is a pervasive sense of the finitude and limits of reason, and of the end or completion of philosophy. He seeks to reverse this by interrupting the linguistic turn with his own turn to mathematics. In particular, Badiou is able to discern in mathematics a mode of thought subtracted from its linguistic or finite determination, and able to grasp the real in a way unaccounted for by critical or linguistic philosophy. On this basis (the separation of thought from language or finitude as evidenced in mathematics) Badiou develops a theory of truth as infinite and eternal, whilst nonetheless realised in and through language. In this way, Badiou’s thought aims to account for the linguistic turn, and for critical philosophy more generally, whilst nonetheless subverting them internally. This leaves us with a compelling and original notion of truth, and of the role of truths in historical change, and in addition resituates philosophy as not so much the discoverer of truths, but their standard-bearer and compiler.