All Abstracts

issue 19 — Rancière: Politics, Art & Sense

Thinking the Unthinkable as a Form of Dissensus: The Case of the Witness

By Anat Ascher

This article discusses the possible political ramifications of bearing witness that can be derived from Rancière's politico-aesthetic thought. Two misguided argumentations that Rancière ceaselessly tries to uproot - Lyotard's notion of complete Otherness and Agamben's analysis of the Holocaust, are analysed. Both argumentations draw on the contention that there is something unthinkable, unrepresentable and untestifiable at the heart of thought. This contention calls for a unique form of bearing witness - bearing witness to the impossibility of truly bearing witness. In trying to account for everything, however, either as thinkable or as unthinkable, these philosophical accounts shift the discussion from political to ethical grounds, in which infinite, unthinkable evil calls for infinite justice and redemption.

Rancière's objection to these lines of reasoning is examined here in light of his notion of politics. As political action is defined by Rancière as the action of a supplementary part in the community which, by calling attention to the fact of it being unaccounted for, makes us question the inner-divisions and redefine the boundaries of the existing regime, an ethical discourse that wishes to set boundaries upon intelligibility is, by definition, opposed to political endeavour.

The article concludes by demonstrating the political implications of Rancière's critique and his notion of politics in the context of bearing witness. For if we accept Rancière's conceptualisation we can regard the words of witnesses as redefining the boundaries of intelligibility, of consensus, thus resulting in dissensus. Not only is the word of the witness salvaged from entering into the "ethical trap," but in some cases it can be considered the highest form of political action, namely a form of dissensus.

The Spare Image in an Unsparing World: Framing the Soldier in an Indeterminate War

By Sudeep Dasgupta

Jacques Rancière’s notion of aesthetics is inextricably linked to the concept of “sense.” Recently (Rancière 2009) the concept of play in aesthetics has been elaborated on by developing the multiple meanings of sense. Sense, in its double meaning of sensate apprehension and the faculty of understanding, provides the basis for understanding what Rancière means by the “partage du sensible.” Through an analysis of a photograph by Ad van Denderen in his 2009 project Occupation Soldier, the essay analyses how sense in its double-meaning provides a mode for comprehending the critical potential of art to stage the tolerability of a world both divided and shared, in the context of war. The essay deepens Rancière’s understanding of sense in relation to aesthetics, while deploying “detachment/ attachment” as frames through which the critical potential of art may be understood.

Feminism After Rancière: Women in J.M. Coetzee and Jeff Wall

By Arne De Boever

Gabriel Rockhill defines what Jacques Rancière calls a political subject as “an empty operator that produces cases of political dispute by challenging the established framework of identification and classification”. This essay challenges the tension between the “emptiness” of the political subject and the “framework of identification and classification” that this definition sets up by showing how “identity” operates in Rancière on the side of both the political subject and the established order. The essay focuses on the identity of “woman” and on Rancière’s discussion of the French revolutionary woman Olympe de Gouges as an example of a political subject: De Gouges is a political subject for Rancière not because she is an empty operator, but because she is a woman enacting the rights of men. The second half of the essay explores this insight by discussing the role of women in J.M. Coetzee’s novel Disgrace and in Jeff Wall’s photographs Picture for Women and Mimic. I argue that the women in these artworks are political subjects in the sense in which Rancière understands this notion.

The Distribution of the Nonsensical and the Political Aesthetics of Humour

By Nicholas Holm

Humour occupies a prominent position within the aesthetic conditions of contemporary culture, both in term of art and popular media. In this article, I consider how Jacques Rancière’s political aesthetic project can contribute to an assessment of the political potential of humour as an aesthetic of dissensus or consensus. To this end, I suggest a modified form of Rancière’s notion of the “distribution of the sensible,” which I refer to as the “distribution of the nonsensical,” as a means to analyse the extent to which particular acts of humour can be thought to challenge or reinforce existing understandings of sense and nonsense. I demonstrate the application of this model through a comparative analysis of Duchamp’s Fountain, and the performance work of Andy Kaufman and Jerry Seinfeld.

These.Are.The Breaks”: Rethinking Disagreement Through Hip Hop

By Robin James

I read Rancière’s theory of disagreement alongside Kodwo Eshun’s theory of hip hop in order to (1) argue that the process of disagreement is meaningfully similar to the practice of remixing, (2) show how hip hop effects redistributions of sensibility, and thus functions as “art” in Rancière’s narrow sense of the term, and (3) examine how redistributions of sensibility function at the level of individual corporeal schemas.  To accomplish the latter two tasks, I analyze the use of a sample from the Watts Band’s “Express Yourself” in both an N.W.A. track and in a TV commercial for Botox.  The appearance of the same musical sample in such different contexts disrupts both the established order of race, class, and gender identities, and the ways that individual corporeal schemas are structured by these orders of identities.  I argue that individual corporeal schemas are important sites for the staging of political disagreement.

Departures from postmodern doctrine in Jacques Rancière’s account of the politics of artistic modernity

By Toni Ross

This essay examines how Jacques Rancière’s thinking of the politics of artistic modernity intersects with, but also departs from postmodernism as a critical and historical paradigm of art. The focus of my remarks will be on the influential account of postmodernism developed by writers Hal Foster, Douglas Crimp and others associated with the journal October in the early nineteen eighties. Two aspects of this branch of postmodernist theory will be discussed in relation to Rancièrian formulations. The first privileges hybridised forms of art practice, and the second discounts the contemporary relevance of aesthetic philosophies taken to underpin modernism. It will be proposed that Rancière’s conception of the politics of modern aesthetics overlaps with the first of these premises, while disputing the second. This comparative approach seeks to clarify the critical value of Rancière’s insistence that ideas of aesthetic autonomy and the avant-garde enlistment of art to transform collective life need to be thought as contending but interrelated tendencies of artistic modernity. The application of this argument to the interpretation of a contemporary artwork concludes the essay. Here a video work by artist Steve McQueen titled, Gravesend (2007) is shown to sustain a tension between the twofold politics of aesthetic modernity identified by Rancière.

Sublime Gender Transposition: The Reformed Platonism of Jacques Rancière’s Aesthetics as Queer Performance

By Karin Sellberg

This article considers the political and aesthetic impact of Jacques Rancière’s reformulation of Platonic dialogics and reinvention of an emancipatory aesthetic sublime in relation to John Cameron Mitchell and Stephen Trask’s punk rock musical Hedwig and the Angry Inch and Leo Bersani and Adam Phillips’ Intimacies. It draws primarily on Rancière’s The Politics of Aesthetics, Aesthetics and Its Discontents and The Emancipated Spectator to argue that the cathartic moment of gender transposition or connection that Bersani and Phillips describe and Hedwig and the Angry Inch enacts represents a redistribution of the gendered sensible not merely on the (virtual or staged) body of the artist, but in the organisation of their aesthetic forums and ultimately society itself.

issue 18 — The Face and Technology

This Face: a Critique of Faciality as Mediated Self-Presence

By Warwick Mules

This article develops a concept of the face as an absolute opening to an outside not yet known or experienced. The article counters Deleuze and Guattari’s pre-critical concept of faciality as an abstract machine and instead argues for a situated critique (critical praxis) of the face opened to otherness in the finite place where it happens ­ as the mark of withdrawal from self-presence. To demonstrate this, the article discusses photographic work as a creative political art practice that makes a face appear as such, thereby enabling new self-relations motivated by renewed democratic concerns for global “matters of concern.”

"I'm Ready For My Close-Up Now": Grey Gardens and the Presentation of Self

By Ilona Hongisto

The paper addresses the presentation of self in the documentary classic Grey Gardens (The Maysles, USA 1976). Drawing from the work of the American sociologist Erving Goffman and particularly from the Hungarian film theorist Béla Balázs and his outline of the facial close-up, the paper elaborates on the presentation of self on the axis of framing and performing. Instead of emphasizing the premises of authenticity and true character – as is customary in analyses of the film – the paper proposes to view Grey Gardens in terms of asymmetric communication. The paper argues that it is in the asymmetric disposition of framing and performing a self that the documentary carries out the making of the Beales of Grey Gardens into legends.     

GUI Faces / Sticky Ethics

By Laurie Johnson

In “Face-Interface, or the Prospect of a Virtual Ethics” (Ethical Space, 2007), I provided the rudiments of an ethical framework for computer mediated communication (CMC) based on the work of Emmanuel Levinas and, in particular, a redefinition of the concept of the ‘face’ on which the ethical relation hinges. The present paper resituates these claims within a more detailed analysis of the underlying assumptions driving research into CMC, which I argue is currently in the midst of a paradigm shift: the assumption of categorical difference between CMC and face-to-face (FTF) communication, supported by the trope of direct competition, is being replaced by more nuanced investigations into the role of presentations of faces in CMC and beyond. I contend further that the conclusions drawn in the previous article continue to hold good because the paradigm shift takes a direction that is matched to the general principle I have articulated as a necessary precursor to an ethics of the virtual: as the object changes, then so does the locus of the phenomenological investigation on which any ethical framework is to be founded. My argument is ultimately that any contingent framework also proves to be necessarily “sticky” – that is, it clings to a notion of adherence rather than to an assumption of inherence – which, I contend further, is a crucial feature of any genuinely ethical ethics.

Appearing to Act Younger: The Face of Avon

By Grayson Cooke

In Avon’s Australian “Summer Beauty” catalogue for 2004, the following sentence is used to describe Anew Pure 02 Oxygenating Cream: “Rejuvi-cell Complex makes surface skin cells appear to act younger.” Another advertisement in the same catalogue describes a product – Hydrofirming Bio6 Eye Cream – using language that gives rise to similar questions: “’Smart-sensing’ technology re-programmes the skin and trains it to moisturise itself.” This paper proceeds from an analysis of the rhetoric of these advertisements, to a discussion of the wider cultural implications of such rhetoric. Bernadette Wegenstein argues, in Getting Under the Skin, that recent representations of the face in advertising media have shifted their emphasis from the face as locus of identity and over-coding, to the skin and organs, which take over from the face as “windows to the soul.” For Wegenstein, any organ or body part can now act as surface, and can give access to an imagined interior. While it would appear that Avon’s advertisements could fit within this model, a number of questions remain: What does it mean that the face is superseded by the skin, which is then deemed to be programmable and artificial? How does this technologization of the face and skin relate to notions of the cyborg and post-human “subject,” and to post-structuralist celebrations of fluid and changing “identities”? And, crucially, what is the interest of capitalist enterprise in producing such a subject?

Faces, Interfaces, Screens: Relational Ontologies of Framing, Attention and Distraction

By Ingrid Richardson

This paper considers the prevalence of screens in everyday life – from the televisual and cinematic to the many large and small screens encountered in both domestic and public spaces – and suggests that each of these encounters has its own corporeal and interfacial modality. More specifically, I will argue that at a perceptual and corporeal level we often engage with media screens by way of various metaphors of “framing,” and that there is an historical and ontological affinity between faces, windows, frames and screens. In the context of contemporary screens, I will explore the aptness of these associations, and the problematic assumption that the window and frame are perceptually analogous to either the televisual, computer or mobile interface. That is, while it is possible to describe the broad-spectrum nature of screens in terms of their consonance with the frontal or facial ontology of the window and the frame, such an interpretation glosses over the complex medium specificities pertaining to smaller and portable devices, which challenge many of the sedimented tropes surrounding the body-screen relation.

issue 17 — Bernard Stiegler and the Question of Technics

Transformation as an Ontological Imperative: The [Human] Future According to Bernard Stiegler

By Stephen Barker

Bernard Stiegler's consistent interrogations respond to both the confused obfuscation and the positive drive of technics and transformation, as central concepts underlying all of Stiegler's thought and writing from Technics and Time 1 (1994/1998) through his most recent analyses of education, “telecracy,” democracy, industry, etc., whether he is addressing the question of technics directly or tangentially. What is being “profoundly transformed,” according to Stiegler, is nothing less that the nature of “the human” itself, by which Stiegler does not mean some safe, traditional notion of “human nature,” since for Stiegler technics and technology are temporally prior to “the human” and obviously, therefore, to any humanism; our need to attempt an understanding of the process of technical evolution is a vitally important ontological (and existential) imperative, an “anthropological technics” transforming both customary human/animal anthropology and “man the tool-maker.” Stiegler asserts that the human is the product, not the cause, of technical evolution, an evolution whose grounding concept is “technics.” In this sense, “the technical,” “techniques,” and “technology” all manifest aspects and modes of operation of technics. For Stiegler, the world is not “to hand,” as it is in Heidegger; rather, “the hand learns from the tool”: “technical” or “technological” innovation is thus a matter of trying to catch up with technics and technologies. This becomes more challenging when we consider that speaking and writing are technical structures – as is language (and the nature of language) itself. “The human” is a result, a subset, of technics. Stiegler erases the magical thinking of a non-technical pre-human, thus transforming the nature of what is “proper to the human.” Ranging across a number of Stiegler's works and concepts, the essay lays out their radical transformativity.

The Duck and the Philosopher: Rhythms of Editing and Thinking between Bernard Stiegler and The Ister

By Patrick Crogan

The Ister (Ross and Barison, 2003)—part documentary, travelogue and philosophical meditation supplementing Heidegger’s meditation on Holderlin’s poem about the Danube—opens and closes with sequences of a duck waddling along the bank of the river. The intervening film, all 3 hours of it, is in effect a large insert edit between these two sequences, or rather, this single sequence. Seen in this way, and given the significant involvement in and engagement with Bernard Stiegler’s thinking of technology that The Ister evinces (interviews with Stiegler, among others, take up much of the time of this insert), the film invites consideration in terms of his theorisation of cinema as key representational technology of the Twentieth century. His published work on cinema postdates the film but it nonetheless represents an intriguing anticipation of and in some ways response to his both theoretical and polemical approach to cinema. This paper will outline and examine some major tenets of Stiegler’s account of cinema by trying to time the momentary duck’s walk that is the extended duration of The Ister. This will involve an editing project of its own that cuts between analysis of the film, theories and practices of editing and Stiegler’s post-phenomenological account of consciousness

The Cosmeceutical Face: Time-Fighting Technologies and the Archive

By Grayson Cooke

In this paper I will discuss the implications of cosmetic "anti-aging" technologies and their marketing discourses for an understanding of the human face as a kind of archive, as a repository of time and memory. I will do this in relation to the writings of Bernard Stiegler and Jacques Derrida. While neither Derrida nor Stiegler talk at any length about the face or about cosmetics, their writings on the archive, temporality, and technology as "tertiary memory," illuminate the questions that revolve around the anti-aging industry's relation to time and the face, in a particularly appropriate manner. With reference to these writings, I will argue that cosmetic anti-aging technologies - frequently understood and marketed as "cosmeceuticals" - constitute the face as an archive at the same time that they work to limit the functioning of the face as an archive. This constitution of the face as archive occurs in the context of the beauty industry and social expectations about gender, youth and beauty; in the context of medical and technological developments related to the anti-aging industry; and in relation to real-time tele-technologies and the technologies of memory, which are intrinsically related to temporality and archivization. In an era characterized by, on the one hand, a massive industry of anti-aging biomedical and cosmetic interventions into the effects of time and aging on the human body, and on the other, by the profusion of digital technologies of real-time reportage and recording and information storage and retrieval, and by the concomitant "crises" of format obsolescence and archival preservation brought about by the speed of development and dissemination of such technologies, cosmeceuticals, ironically, preserve the face by not preserving it.

Politics and Aesthetics, or, Transformations of Aristotle in Bernard Stiegler

By Daniel Ross

Bernard Stiegler argues for the necessity of pursuing the question of the relation between politics and aesthetics, because today aesthetics has become a vehicle for calculating and controlling desire, including both economic and political desire. The problem is that this attempt to calculate and control encounters a limit, becoming destructive of desire itself. Establishing a future for individual and collective becoming requires understanding the reason for this limit. In psychoanalytic terms this might be understood as the susceptibility of desire to regress to drive-based states. Stiegler's understanding of this susceptibility, however, also relies on Aristotle's account of three kinds of soul. By grasping the relation between the vegetative, sensitive and noetic souls compositionally rather than oppositionally, Stiegler is able to explain the limits of control in terms of the intermittence of the noetic soul's noeticity. The sensitivity of the noetic soul is perpetually capable of being lured by the sensational, which when it is pursued systematically tends to reduce the temporality of desire to the instantaneous (dis-)satisfactions of the drives. Only if this question of the individual and collective loss of savoir faire and savoir vivre, which together Stiegler calls general proletarianisation, is addressed, could our political and industrial model be transformed such that it fosters new desire, rather than continuing to contribute to its exhaustion.

Culture Industry Redux: Stiegler and Derrida on Technics and Cultural Politics

By Robert Sinnerbrink

This essay seeks to further the critical reception of Stiegler's philosophy of technology by situating his work within the legacy of critical theory (broadly understood) and deconstruction (broadly understood). Drawing on what Richard Beardsworth has described as Stiegler's 'Left-Derrideanism'-his radical re-thinking of the problem of technics and related call for a "politics of memory"-I argue that Stiegler's transformation of both Heidegger and Derrida retrieves and renews the interrupted Frankfurt school tradition of culture industry critique. What we might call Stiegler's 'deconstructive materialism' reinvigorates the project of a cultural politics that would take place in the intersection between culture, technics, and politics in the more conventional sense. In this respect, Stiegler's culture industry redux points to a number of important practical cultural responses to the debilitating malaise that increasingly afflicts politics in liberal capitalist democracies. I conclude by suggesting what such a Stieglerian 'cultural politics of memory' might entail.

Animality, Humanity, and Technicity

By Nathan Van Camp

The last decades have witnessed a renewed interest in philosophical anthropology. Philosophers working in this field no longer discuss human nature as such, but inquire into the various ways in which scientific, religious and metaphysical discourses on this theme underpin certain power relations. Of late, the focus of this discussion has shifted towards the relation between man and animal. This essay will examine the fertility of this approach by comparing Giorgio Agamben’s “anthropological machine” with Bernard Stiegler’s notion of technics as elaborated in his multi-volume work Technics and Time. We will try to show that the way in which Agamben elaborates the former concept is related to Stiegler’s critical reading of the paleontologist André Leroi-Gourhan. But whereas Agamben ends up expressing his wish to put a stop to this “machine” in a (quasi-)religious vocabulary, Stiegler argues that the anthropocentrism inherent to it is a result of forgetting “originary technicity.”

Stiegler and Marx for a Question Concerning Technology

By Irmak Ertuna

In this paper I elaborate on the conceptual framework shared by Marx and Stiegler. Stiegler criticizes Marx for failing to conceive technology as anything other than means and for not assessing the role of technology in the formation of psyche. However, a non-essentialist reading of Marx demonstrates that Marx has distinguished objectification of the human through material production of the world (i.e. exteriorization) from the historical fact of alienation. Moreover, for Marx, the human has always been constituted through the activity of production that is at once technological, social, and transformative. In order to counter the neo-liberal mystification of technology that manifests itself as both technophilia and technophobia, we need to resort to a Marxist understanding of technology as pharmakon, or as Stiegler writes, "at one and the same time human power (puissance) and as the power of the self-destruction of humanity" (Technics 85).

Unweaving the Program: Stiegler and the Hegemony of Technics

By Andrés Vaccari

This paper examines the empirical and historical aspects of Bernard Stiegler's philosophy of technology, arguing that it consolidates, rather than challenges, a number of traditional ontological distinctions; in particular, those between living and technological, genetic and non-genetic, and nature and culture. The two main foci of criticism are Stiegler's historical claims regarding the trajectory of technological development, and his questionable use of informatic models and writing metaphors to think about technics. The notion of 'program' is examined, as well as its applicability in the context of enculturation. Finally, the paper offers an alternative myth of technics that aims to rescue what Stiegler's philosophy forgets: the irreducible heterogeneity of technology.

Prolegomena to a Future Robot History: Stiegler, Epiphylogenesis and Technical Evolution

By Andrés Vaccari & Belinda Barnet

How does one tell the story of a machine? Can we say that technical artefacts have their own genealogies, their own evolutionary dynamic? Bernard Stiegler feels this question is an urgent one, and calls for more research into technical evolution in his book, Technics and Time. In the following essay, we will be answering Stiegler's call. Firstly, we will be reviewing the work of several key theorists from different disciplines who have attempted to understand technical evolution, many of whom Stiegler uses in his own work; in order of appearance, paleontologist Niles Eldredge, the philosophers Jacques Derrida and Manuel DeLanda, and archeologist André Leroi-Gourhan. We will then lift some ideas and problems from each of them in an effort to construct a prolegomena to the history of a technical machine, a history which is not included here and which has yet to be written. We want to build a theory of technical evolution.

issue 16 — Democracy Under Fire: the uses and abuses of democracy in the public sphere

The War on English: An Answer to the Question, What is Postmodernism?

By Niall Lucy & Steve Mickler

Attacks on English teaching and English teachers are widespread in the Australian public sphere today, centred usually on disparaging claims about something called "postmodernism." In political terms, these attacks are mounted just as often from the left as from the right; hence they would seem to be based on sound universal principles, having nothing to do with politics. In this way "postmodernism" is made to seem "anti-commonsensical" or "ideological," as we argue here by way of a discussion of Kevin Donnelly's Dumbing Down. For us, though, "postmodernism" represents a continuation (by other means) of the Enlightenment's commitment to critical thought on behalf of an idea of democracy, such that the war on "postmodern" English is consistent with conservative forms of opposition to that idea.

Democratic Hospitalities: national borders and the impossibility of the other for democracy

By Elaine Kelly

This paper is interested in looking at the similarities and differences in the work of Agamben and Derrida. Agamben‘s work on sovereign power and “bare life” has been taken up extensively in critical theory as a way of understanding the on-going violence of state-centric “liberal democratic” regimes of government. Here, I endeavor to draw out the implications of Agamben‘s theory for understandings of democracy and hospitality. Following this, I compare such ideas with the deconstructive approach advanced by Derrida. Derrida‘s writings offer a far more complex and aporetic understanding of hospitality, which insist on the unknown and the unforeseeable, as well as a conception of equality irreducible to calculation or numbers. In Rogues, Derrida poses the following question: “does this measure of the immeasurable, this democratic equality, end at citizenship, and thus at the borders of the nation-state? Or should we extend it to . . . the whole world of humans assumed to be like me . . . ?” (53) This essay will attempt to engage with this vital question via a theoretical exploration of Derrida‘s work on “democracy” and “hospitality”. A series of questions motivate my analysis: how do democracy and hospitality operate together conceptually? How can Derrida's works intervene in debates about asylum seekers, refugees and immigration in Australia? How can we give something back to a hospitality and democracy that has been hijacked by neo-liberal, neo-conservative agendas and discourse?

Democracy of the Civil Dead: The Blind Trade in Citizenship

By Terry Eyssens

Liberal democratic citizenship has mutated into a ‘blind trade’ with a trajectory towards civil death, under which, in the name of democracy, citizens are expected to relinquish more rights and participatory possibilities in return for unguaranteed security, spectacles, and unspecified political, and economic ‘goods’ and ‘protections’. ‘Civil death’, the legislative deprivation of civil rights, is spreading beyond the bounds of contractarian logic and into the rights of (non-criminal) citizens. It is conceivable that citizens will find themselves without any meaningful political and civil rights, inhabiting a ‘democracy of the civil dead’. Rather than attempting to refine or redefine the contractarian approach or, to return to a classical Greek model of democracy, this paper draws on Agamben, Arendt, Nancy and Derrida in order to pose the possibility of the presence of ‘denizens’ who, in rejecting citizenship and the enclosure of rights and obligations inscribed in it, take up an overtly political position of exposure which opens up the state to contestation and the possibility of a democracy worthy of the name.

Judith Butler, Gender, Radical Democracy: What’s Lacking?

By Julie MacKenzie

While Judith Butler may be recognised foremost as a theorist of gender, this paper seeks to chart the status of democracy in her work.  Butler’s work on gender is firmly located within a “radical democratic” politics, and it is in the name of a notion of radical democracy that Butler’s work proceeds. This paper, then, critically interrogates the nexus of gender and democratic politics in Butler’s work. 

This paper is in two parts. The first takes issue with Butler’s account of the relationship of gender and materiality. Butler rejects any appeal to the pre-discursive status of sexual difference.  Instead, configuration of power relations, a particular representation of the outside to discourse becomes reified as material, natural, prediscursive. And her answer to this question is, famously, her performativity thesis, her argument that matter should be seen as the product of “a process of materialization that stabilizes over time to produce the effect of boundary, fixity and surface we call matter” (26). This approach explains her understanding of what is denoted by “sex”: it comes to appear natural, material, only as an effect of reiterative practices. 

This rendering of the relationship of matter to discourse, I contend, serves to entrench a radical disjunction between them.  Rather than refiguring ontology as itself forceful, dynamic and wholly political, she reasserts the primacy of the discursive against the material, and treats the realm of signification, because variable, contestable and dynamic, as the proper locus of the political.

The second part of the paper suggests that the problems with Butler’s account of the relationship of gender and materiality persist in her strategy for radical democratic transformation.  For Butler, what acts as the motor of political futurity is that any attempt to describe the pre-discursive “reality” of a particular situation will not be a “true” account, but rather a contingent articulation generated from within the realm of discourse. The contingency and futurity of the political is guaranteed by the referent’s insistent demand to be represented, and the fact that this demand is always responded to imperfectly.  What results is that any rendering of the contents of the outside to signification is generated from within signification.  Because never fully representational, signification is engaged in an endless process of reiteration that, over time, gains the appearance of ontological reality.  It is in the possibility of articulating this process differently that Butler locates the potential for radical democracy.

The paper gestures towards a more radical refiguring of the relationship between matter and the political than Butler’s work allows, suggesting that we must instead acknowledge that matter itself is variable, and that democratic politics, far from being based upon the inevitable absence of the ontological from signification, is an eminently material transformation.

Democracy Now! Decolonising US News Media

By Kevin Howley

U.S. news media has been colonized, captured within the nexus of corporate and state power that characterizes modern imperialism. Abdicating its historic role as a watchdog of the powerful, seemingly incapable of ferreting out truth from lies, and unwilling to provide a robust and inclusive forum for public debate, contemporary American journalism is in a profound state of crisis (McChesney, 2004). This paper considers the role an emerging independent media sector has played in revitalizing American journalistic form and practice. Specifically, this essay examines Democracy Now! - a daily news program that challenges the hegemony of corporate news media.

Following a concise overview of recent failures of the corporate press, from reporting during the lead up to the US-led invasion of Iraq to the silencing of dissident voices at home and abroad, this paper proceeds with an analysis of the journalistic philosophy and news routines employed by Democracy Now! Here, I place special emphasis on participatory journalism and the innovative uses of technology that contribute to the success of Democracy Now! The essay concludes with some thoughts on the part Democracy Now! plays in promoting participatory democracy, amplifying voices of dissent, and legitimating an oppositional stance toward American neo-imperialism.

Keywords: corporate press, independent media, media convergence, participatory journalism, neo-imperialism

GetUp! for what? Issues Driven Democracy in a Transforming Public Sphere

By Henk Huijser & Janine Little

This paper looks at the Australian online activists’ site GetUp! as a case study in consideration of democracy as an idea that is in Derrida’s terms ‘yet to arrive’. In the specific Australian context of the lead-up to the 2007 Federal Election, we explore the impact and popularity of GetUp! as at once a consequence of media fragmentation and a disintegrating public sphere, and a driver of a new form of democracy that might be called ‘issues-based’, rather than dependent on membership of, and loyalty to, traditional political parties. By first outlining some key theoretical currents in discussion of new media, and the general interrelationship between media and democracy, the paper views through GetUp! the ways in which subversion and renegotiation of power affect transformation of the ideal of the public sphere. 

“Oriental Despotism” and the Democratisation of Iraq in The Australian

By Benjamin Isakhan

While much recent scholarship has extended Said’s critique of Orientalism to the portrayal of people of Middle Eastern descent or of the Islamic faith in the Australian news media, little attention has been paid to the ways in which these same organs utilise Orientalist clichés in their reports on democratic developments in the Middle East. This paper seeks to address this lacuna by examining the Australian news media’s coverage of the series of democratic elections and the national referendum held in Iraq during 2005. Focusing specifically on The Australian newspaper, this article finds that much of the debate and discussion of Iraq’s democratisation has been underpinned by the discourse of “Oriental despotism” and is subsequently premised on the assumption that the Western world is the legitimate legatee of democracy and therefore reserves the right to democratise – under fire if necessary – the backward, barbaric and despotic Middle Eastern “other”.

issue 15 — Walter Benjamin and the Virtual: Politics, Art, and Mediation in the Age of Global Culture

Walter Benjamin on Photography: Towards Elemental Politics

By Mika Elo

In contemporary media studies Walter Benjamin's “media aesthetics” is often considered as being based on a materialistic notion of media that has lost its currency. However, a closer study shows that it is only against the background of Benjamin's early writings that the currency of his “media aesthetics” can be properly estimated today. In this article, I'll study the intertwining of the “metaphysical” and the “historical” registers of Benjamin's “media aesthetics” focusing on photography. Hereby, I'll argue for the relevance of the Benjamin's approach for theorising the photographic medium at the threshold of the “post-photographic era.” The notion of  “optical unconscious” serves here as a starting point. Benjamin coined the notion to designate the new realm of experience made accessible by photography. “It is another nature that speaks to the camera than to the eye.” This “second nature” speaking to the camera detaches the visible form the capacities of the eye. This can be termed virtualisation of vision. Equipped with the camera, the eye sees virtually more than it can actually read. Subsequently, the eye is facing the task of learning how to read the “second nature” – how to actualize virtualities of the visible. By displacing the vision, photography undermines any notion of natural visibility, i.e. natural “readability” of the visual appearances. This displacement opens up possibilities for grasping the “difference of magic and technics” as throughout the “historical variable.” Benjamin writes of August Sanders Antlitz der Zeit (1929) in terms of a “training atlas” (Übungsatlas). He also mentions Karl Blossfeldt’s Urformen der Kunst (1928) and Eugène Atget's Lichtbilder (1930) in the same vein. Benjamin obviously suggests that in these “training atlases” a new readability of photography can be discerned, and that these photography books can be used to train “visual literacy.” The mode and the goal, or programme, of this training, however, is anything but obvious. In order to interpret Benjamin on this point, recourse to his “Work of Art” essay (especially to the second version of it) is needed. Here, Benjamin develops a dialectics of nature and technics. In his analysis, the photographic media make up a decisive scene of demarcation between “first” and “second” technics. What is at stake in this process of negotiating, is the reconfiguration of the “medium of perception” on the one hand and the “politicisation of art” on the other hand. Hereby, as I will argue, the task of media theoretician turns out to be comparable to the “task of the translator.”

Benjamin, Trauma and the Virtual

By Allen Meek

Trauma has become central to debates about history and memory in an era in which digital information has apparently freed itself of any past located in place or material objects.  Has trauma become the model for deep memory in a culture of pure simulation?  While Benjamin developed his widely influential cultural analysis in the 1920s and 30s, new media today support a virtual culture that claims to have moved beyond these earlier technological revolutions. This paper, however, argues that Benjamin’s reading of Freud with Bergson enables us to think trauma with the virtual in ways that remain provocative today.  By arguing that Bergson’s philosophy of time unintentionally described what cinema would become, Deleuze potentially collapses all human experiences into technologically-mediated forms.  In Benjamin the virtual describes a transformative potential that includes, but is never completely assimilated into, mediated experience. Mediated images, carrying the traces of traumatic events in the past, become the site of a critical intervention in history. 

Cybersurgery and Surgical (Dis)embodiment: Technology, Science, Art and the Body

By Julie Doyle

In “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Benjamin deploys the analogy of the magician and surgeon to illustrate the different ways in which the painter (magician) and cameraman (surgeon) technologically mediate, and hence alter, our perception of reality. For Benjamin, the use of camera equipment by the cameraman refigures reality by technologically penetrating and re-presenting it as “multiple fragments” (227). This penetration is, according to Benjamin, unlike that of the painter, whose “distance from reality” (227) enables a more total representation of reality than the fragmented one presented in film. Benjamin’s use of the figure of the surgeon to illustrate how the technological mediation of reality constitutes a new condition of modernity is a radical, but surprisingly under-examined, evaluation of the mediated status of the body within contemporary medical science. By choosing the surgical penetration of the body as representative of an increasingly fragmented and technologically mediated reality, Benjamin inadvertently highlights the role of medical technologies and surgical practices in conceptions of the body. The result of this mediation is the fragmentation of the body through the medicalised focus upon specific body parts and organs, at the expense of the whole. At the same time, the increasing technological penetration of the body in medicine, which in Benjamin’s terms leads to a distortion of and disembodiment from reality (and hence the body), anticipates the current use of virtual and remote technologies in cybersurgical practices, where both imaging and surgical technologies penetrate the body.

This paper examines Benjamin’s understanding of technological mediation and fragmented reality in specific relation to the surgical mediation of the body and to conceptions of embodiment. Through a focus upon the historical development of surgery in the late eighteenth century and its current practices, the paper demonstrates Benjamin’s relevancy in understanding the mediation of the body, and processes of (dis)embodiment, through the lens of surgical technologies. At the same time, it critiques Benjamin’s assertion that the painter and surgeon offer different versions of reality by analysing the intimate relationship between art and surgery, as a set of perceptions and practices, in the (historical) mediation of the body, examining their similarities and differences.* The paper shows the importance of Benjamin’s work in understanding the surgical mediation and medical treatment of the body in (late)modernity and in the (dis)embodied practices of (cyber)surgery. In doing so, it seeks to re-embody the body by calling attention to the artistic and technological processes which underpin the practice of surgery, critiquing the authority of medical science in conceiving and managing the body as a fragmented, disembodied form.

* The current exhibition, How Do You Look? Visual Cognition in painting and surgery, at the Hunterian Museum at the Royal College of Surgeons of London, is an example of how artists and surgeons share similar ways of seeing, and explores the intersections between imaging and surgical technologies.

Fossilising the Commodity:  Tactical Engagements with Time, Art and the Virtual in Models by Ricky Swallow

By Marita Bullock

Since the mid-1990s, the Melbourne-based artist, Ricky Swallow, has created meticulously detailed, 1:1 scale models of outdated mass cultural forms, all of which have been constructed from the rudimentary materials that we might find in a kindergarten – cardboard, craft glue, plastic tubes and paint.  Many of the objects that Swallow appropriates for his works evoke the ubiquity of late capitalism and the infiltration of the commodity image throughout all forms of cultural life; most recently he has taken particular care with outdated technologies and toys, such as the once cutting-edge Apple Mac logo, an upturned pair of Campers-brand sneakers, a lonely ibook, telescope, game boy, and a number of stonehenge-like ghetto-blasters, to name just a few examples.  All of these forms are suggestive of a thoroughgoing warping of time: the laborious processes through which Swallow constructs his commodities in 1:1 scale precision off-sets the speed with which late capitalism renders its images obsolete, just as the small-time precision detailed within the hobby models come to recall the big-time equations and myths unearthed by an archaeologist’s fossil. 

This paper analyses the multiple ways in which Swallow’s uncanny replications of obsolete technologies stage a tactical engagement with questions of time, the commodity and the virtual in postmodern culture.  It suggests that Swallow’s forms undermine the capitulation of time to commodity culture and the subsumption of art to design that, in Hal Foster’s words, mark the “cynical duplicity” generally attached to ‘postmodern’ simulations and repetitions. The paper mobilises Walter Benjamin’s metaphor of the commodity fossil, and its associated critique of time and commodity relations as the central critical concept; I argue that Swallow’s handcrafting of outdated commodities, as if they are objects unearthed from an archaeological dig, extend Benjamin’s fossil metaphor into a critique of postmodern/virtual image culture.  The paper contends that Swallow’s forms enact a critical distance from the postmodern, and the stagnant temporality of retroversion, in the way that they literalise Benjamin’s metaphor whilst rendering commodity logos into concrete forms.  Swallow’s practise of literalisation is further read in light of Michael Taussig’s theory of the tactics of mimesis, which is understood as enabling a new reading of Benjamin’s analysis of time, representation and the commodity in the fossil form. This, in turn, opens up a reading of Swallow’s ‘handmade readymades’ as both ironic and sincere engagements with Benjamin’s dilemma of reification; Swallow’s forms are read as subversions of the stagnation of time in the commodity in the way that they literally draw us to our senses. 

Aura as Productive Loss

By Warwick Mules

This paper explores the concept of aura as productive loss. My aim is to read Benjamin’s later essays on photography and art in the age of mechanical reproduction in the light of a reading of some of his earlier essays, especially “On the Program of the Coming Philosophy,”  and “Painting, or Signs and Marks.” I argue that Benjamin’s theory of aura (outlined in the later essays) stems from his attempt in the earlier essays to uncover a field of lived experience defined by the mark as the material trace of a technological operation that no longer functions, but which nevertheless provides an oblique access to originariness, or the capacity of technology to make present that which has already passed. In the later essays on photography and art, Benjamin renames this experience “aura.” When read in this way, aura no longer designates an ontological division between an original experience of plenitude in a pre-reproductive culture, and an impoverished experience of the copy in reproductive culture. Rather, aura becomes that which is necessary for and produced in reproductive culture: its mark of originariness as (false) primary access to presence. Benjamin thus provides us with a way of reading culture in terms of the production of origins, as false or pseudo-presence. In particular I identify phantasmagoria as a contemporary site of virtual experience saturated by aura. I argue that a critique of the auratic quality of phantasmagoria is now necessary in order to uncover the stake that contemporary digital technologies have in recovering lost origin.

The Horror of Disconnection: The Auratic in Technological Malfunction

By Martin Dixon

This paper revisits Benjamin's “The Work of Art in the Age of  Mechanical Reproduction” essay and traces the fate of the idea that contemporary media technologies have abolished the auratic component of “distance.”. Such technologies have long been understood as participating – for good or ill – in globalisation. But there is a tension in the Mechanical Reproduction essay since while it is often taken as celebrating the revolutionary possibilities of post-auratic mediation, it also anticipates the dialectical return – indeed, the “resurrection” – of the auratic within these same technologies. I will emphasise an obvious but overlooked fact of modern technology: it often fails. And I will argue that it is in technology’s failure that traces of aura, of cultic and religious elements reappear. It is a fact of the economy of digital technology that sound and visuals must be “compressed;” because of the constraints of bandwidth, data must be stripped to a bare minimum if it is to be stored or disseminated. Digital representations and mediations, therefore, are often of an extremely poor quality; they are distorted and obscure. What is more, when the most horrific of events are technologically mediated (i.e., CCTV footage of the last sighting of a missing child; the increasingly desperate efforts of air traffic control to reach a hijacked plane; digital photographs, taken on mobile phones, of the London underground bombings; video statements by masked suicide bombers) these terrifying testimonies are delivered by low fidelity, even failing technologies, and their representations are marked by the mute, asignifying patina of the functioning of the medium. So it is that communication technologies – the mobile and satellite phone, the video link – often do not work as intended (the channel breaks up, the message is distorted) and, as a result, one experiences the sudden reintroduction of distance, the veiling of the phenomenon and the horror of disconnection.

Strategically, this collapse of communication plays into the ideology of global news reportage as it dramatises the struggle to connect with dangerous parts of the world. And, ironically, the “authenticity” of modern technologically mediated testimony (another important Benjaminian theme) is proportional to its interference, to the poverty of its representation. Noise escapes the logic of mechanical reproduction and mediation since it is not reproducible as such, but arises in and through the act of reproduction and mediation. Noise reintroduces distance, uniqueness and eventality to the reproduced.  Noise, distortion, interference and failure mark the return of a technology to its state of nature. And as Benjamin points out in “Language as Such and the Language of Man,” nature is mute, it has no language, and in its muteness, it laments. In the midst of communication, in suppressed and repressed noise, in its ghostly insubstantiality, is an asignifying lament.

“Politicizing Art”: Benjamin’s Redemptive Critique of Technology in the Age of Fascism

By Amresh Sinha

Benjamin's essay on “The Work of Art in the age of Mechanical Reproduction” is a meditative exercise on the relationship of art and technology and its profound impact on the history of human perception In this paper I argue, as opposed to the widely held belief, that Benjamin's interest in the art of reproduction is not purely animated by the development of technology for its own sake, but is prompted by the given political urgency of the time in 1936 to prevent its regression or mediation into a politics of ritual.  What can Benjamin teach us about the constellation of language, politics, destruction, and tradition? If fascism, by rendering the political sphere into the aesthetical realm, is using aesthetics for its own political end, then the political necessity of the time makes it imperative for the arts to be organized at a political level. The function of art is crucial both to the preservation and the destruction of society.  One must also ask what the instrumental power of art and technology as expressed in the fascist appropriation of culture as a means of political propaganda can achieve? Between the aestheticisation of politics and politicisation of aesthetics, the concept that mediates is that of usefulness. Benjamin always endeavours to show his affinity for the discarded and useless productions of art, and it is not surprising that he finds them “useful,” especially at the time of extreme danger, when life itself cannot be salvaged unless a useful opposition is mounted against the increasing threat to life by fascist forces. The technological redemption does not lie in its usage, in its functional aspect, but in its discarded and unrecognised potentials, in its uselessness.

Dialectical Film Criticism: Walter Benjamin’s Historiography, Cultural Critique and the Archive

By Catherine Russell

Walter Benjamin suggests that the past “only comes into legibility” in the present. Several of Benjamin’s more familiar terms, such as the flaneur, dialectical optics, the collector and the gambler, may likewise be applied to the practice of historical film criticism. In this paper Benjamin’s historiography is developed as a method of film criticism. The renewed access to film history made possible by new digital technologies has opened up new modes of film criticism that draw on the archive of film history.

This paper will draw on Benjamin’s Arcades Project in conjunction with the film studies concepts of “vernacular modernism” (Miriam Hansen) and film melodrama, in addition to theoretical frameworks provided by Giorgio Agamben, Jürgen Habermas. Benjamin’s diverse and unsystematic writings, in my view, provide important tools for writing film criticism that is “against the grain.” The sense of urgency and impending political crisis –and the utopian potential of image culture – that are embedded in his view of modernity are no less relevant to contemporary society, and his criticism is a reminder of the critical values that are embedded in popular culture and in image culture on a larger scale. Film examples in the paper include the narrative cinema of Naruse Mikio, the documentary film Heir to an Execution, and the experimental film Kristall.

The Dissipating Aura of Cinema

By Kristen Daly

In the “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproducibility,” Walter Benjamin predicted the decline in aura of the art object.  This paper argues that in fact, cinema, as film, remained precious and original, hard to reproduce and distribute, retaining cult-value. Only now, with the introduction of digital and computer technologies, have Benjamin’s expectations of cinema come to fruition.  Benjamin discusses two characteristics of art objects that change under conditions of reproducibility. The first is the reduction of the primacy of the original.  According to Benjamin, previous to mechanical reproduction, the original was the prerequisite to the concept of authenticity.  Reproducibility makes the copy independent of the original, thus reducing the primacy of the original. This paper will argue how, increasingly, the ease of digital storage, reproduction, manipulation, and distribution threatens the concept of an “original” and therefore the aura of cinematic objects as representational artworks. The second characteristic is the mobility of the copy.  This mobility of the copy allows it to be experienced in different and unanticipated ways, modifying the way cinematic artworks “take place.”  Digitization takes this mobility to new levels; thus in the digital age our exposure to moving images becomes increasingly ubiquitous.  This paper will examine in greater detail how this ubiquity changes the experience of cinema. The paper examines the characteristics Benjamin prematurely attributed to the reproducible filmic art object and how the “tremendous shattering of tradition,” which he described is beginning as movies morph from ritual art objects to tele-cultural forms with new expectations and experiences. 

From Flâneur to Web Surfer: Videoblogging, Photo Sharing and Walter Benjamin @ the Web 2.0

By Simon Lindgren

In the “Mirror file” of The Arcades Project, Walter Benjamin describes a popular fascination with looking glasses, lenses and image stimulation. He talks about an ocular passion marking the late nineteenth century when mirrors were incorporated into strangely named machineries of image production: kaleidoscopes, phantasma-parastasia, phanoramas, stereograms, cycloramas, kigoramas, myrioramas etc. This paper explores and illustrates how Benjamin's analysis of the nineteenth century culture of consumption might contribute to an understanding of the new communal formations and self-reflexive subjectivities of the Internet in the twenty first century. Theoretically, this is done with a specific focus on the concept of the flâneur as discussed in The Arcades Project, and on some lines of reasoning that are central to his essay on “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” The empirical emphasis is on two examples of so called Web 2.0 technologies: The photo sharing service of flickr and the videoblogging functionality of YouTube. The paper firstly addresses how the notion of the flâneur needs to be updated and modified to work in an analysis of Web 2.0 technologies. Secondly, it brings the contemporary examples of online photo sharing and videoblogging into the discussion. Thirdly, it revisits some key passages of Benjamin’s writing and tries to apply them to these examples before returning to the overarching question concerning the continued usefulness of Benjamin’s theory.

Contemplative Immersion: Benjamin, Adorno & Media Art Criticism

By Daniel Palmer

This paper explores the immersive character of digital media art in relation to aesthetic theories of Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno. It asks what contribution Benjamin and Adorno have to offer media art criticism. In particular, it seeks to understand how their different approaches enable us to critique the “virtual” experience of an interactive digital installation. Benjamin is famous for his complex, non-deterministic relation to technological media. In “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1936), he offers what has become the twentieth-century’s most influential interpretation of both the threats and opportunities posed by the mechanical media of film and photography. Theorists of digital media have seized Benjamin’s ideas, such as the notion that the work of art comes to look more and more like the work of art meant for reproduction. In contrast to Benjamin’s ambiguous embrace of the spectator’s new critical agency brought about by mechanical media, Adorno held a more antagonistic relationship to technology, and a more redemptive role for art. Adorno understood art as a reservoir of critique – ascribing to art a capacity to challenge the instrumental rationality and repressive authority of capitalism.

In this paper I am interested in locating Benjamin’s and Adorno’s ideas in relation to the experience of immersion characteristic of digital media installations. While immersion has a long history in Western aesthetics (as traced by Oliver Grau), in the face of new media artworks that require the active involvement of the viewer – in which the work is constantly updating and transforming itself – we are left with the “interface” in place of the art object. For example, photo-based art in the digital era increasingly becomes a spatialised interface for embodied viewer interaction. Its “flexible data set” (Mark Hansen) may be contrasted to the traditional photographic image’s static inscription of a moment in time. The temporal experience of new media art also involves a process of spatialisation that challenges the tradition of aesthetic distance. As Oliver Grau points out in his book Virtual Art, “in certain seemingly living virtual environments a fragile, central element of art comes under threat: the recipient's act of distancing, which is essential for producing the “aesthetic image space” and enabling critical reflection.

In an unusual turn of phrase in Aesthetic Theory, Adorno writes: “Aesthetic experience becomes living experience only by way of its object, in that instant in which artworks themselves become animate under its gaze. . . . Through contemplative immersion the immanent processual quality of the work is set free. . . . This immanent dynamic is, in a sense, a higher-order element of what artworks are” (175–6, emphasis added). Adorno’s notion of “contemplative immersion” appears paradoxical, suggesting both a distance and a nearness. In this paper I explore Adorno’s paradoxical phrase in light of Benjamin’s understanding of aura, distraction and the spectator’s critical agency. At a time when art criticism is widely held to be in crisis – even without reference to the changes of production, transmission and reception that media art bring – this paper examines the unrealised potential of Benjamin and Adorno to media art criticism.

Tillers of the Soil/Travelling Journeymen: Modes of the Virtual

By A.-Chr. Engels-Schwarzpaul

Walter Benjamin’s account of story telling as an exchange of experience uses images of embodied interaction: between a “resident tiller of the soil” and a “trading seaman,” or between “resident master craftsman and . . .  travelling journeymen working together in the same rooms” (85). These metaphors may make his approach seem traditional but, historically or in terms of agency, Benjamin’s conception of mediation (in “The Task of the Translator” and “The Storyteller”) is anything but static. According to him, a good translation risks the translator’s own language, to be “powerfully affected by the foreign tongue” (81), and there is a “central reciprocal relationship” of mutual supplementation and renewal between languages” (74-5). [1]

Virtual technologies in global contexts seem to intensify mediation’s Babelic side. They are also part of blended everyday realities that mould our sensorium, through virtual and embodied experiences, changing the ways in which the latter presents the world to our reflection. Thus, apart from its relationship to the real, actual and potential, the virtual as modality has an aesthetic dimension. This is, as perception, about “visibilities of  . . .  places and abilities of the body in those places, about the partition of private and public spaces, about the very configuration of the visible and the relation of the visible to what can be said about it.” [2] It opens up different aspects of embodied experience and creative imagination which, in rare cases, can become political.

Assuming that the transformations caused by electronic communication and media flows have already developed past their early stages, it is possible to look for historical connections linking them to earlier technological, spatial and temporal developments. [3] Before Benjamin’s time, the panopticon and panorama as architectural forms set up regimes of visibility that created new distinctions between being seen and seeing. The position of the Samoan fale at the Tropical Islands Resort in Germany may reveal different regimes of reality (virtual, real, blended) and the changing roles of aesthetics and imagination. It may focus questions about connections between the local and global; translatability in digital mediation; and spatio-temporal ruptures and interconnections.

This paper will examine changing modes of reality at Tropical Islands Resort, taking into account the history of its planning and implementation. Master craftsmen from Samoa, Singapore, Bali, the Amazon basin, Kenya, and Thailand assembled in the same space, inside a gigantic hangar in the East German countryside, to erect tangible, real buildings made from traditional materials. It seems this exotic architecture alongside exotic performances is supposed to house a virtual – between digital flows and place-bound experience – while the website mediates the resort’s physical environment in a global domain. In this complementary reorganization of the visible – what is the task of translators? Will they risk their own language, and do they strengthen or weaken the reciprocal relationships between languages or images? If aesthetic experience enables a different way of seeing, then what becomes visible here, and what can we say about it?

Notes
[1] Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. Illuminations. Ed. H. Arendt. New York: Schocken, 1969.
[2] Rancière, Jacques. “Comment and Responses.” Theory & Event, 6.4 (2003): 1-28.
[3] See Fold, Søren. (1999). “An Aesthetic Criticism of the Media: The Configurations of Art, Media and Politics in Walter Benjamin's Materialistic Aesthetics.” Parallax 5.3(1999): 22-35.

Paradise Regained? The Work of Mediation Technology in an Age of Open Communities

By John Grech

Paradise Regained? takes up Benjamin's thought on violence and the role of globally transmitted artifacts in an age of mediation in conjunction with anthropologist Pierre Clastres’s analyses of South American Indian society’s political and power relations. It then speculates on the prospects for the arrival of an open, democratic, mediated community, revisiting and redefining ideas about the role and freedom of individuals and communities in conjunction with the State’s use of violence and coercion in making global society governable.

issue 14 — Accidental Environments

Cruel Weather: Natural Disasters and Structural Violence

By Dennis Soron

Drawing upon the work of Johan Galtung, Pierre Bourdieu, Mike Davis, and other contemporary thinkers, this paper aims to establish a provisional framework for understanding the recent spate of global weather-related disasters not as arbitrary, independently-arising environmental accidents, but as expressions of “structural violence” - that is, the normal, unexceptional, anonymous, and often unscrutinized violence woven into the routine workings of prevailing power structures. In today's context, the damage wrought by our increasingly entropic weather system cannot simply be attributed to brute, accidental and nonhuman origins; indeed, it has increasingly drawn attention to our own culpability in destabilizing the climate and undermining the support systems that help to shield us from its unmediated effects.

In this sense, ecological violence – that is, the callous misuse and despoliation of nature itself – rebounds back upon us as structural violence, destroying lives and livelihoods, amplifying existing conflicts and inequalities, and exposing countless people to severe storms, floods, drought, fire, disease, displacement, and chronic food and water insecurity. Responding effectively to the structural violence of climate change will require a correspondingly structural program of social change, oriented not simply towards small lifestyle improvements and technological fixes, but towards achieving a greater degree of democratic control over economic life, refitting the scale of production and consumption to respect environmental limits, reweaving our social and ecological safety nets, and creating a culture that respects the integrity, value, and complexity of human and nonhuman life.

Machine Breaths: Assembling the Mechanical Ventilator Body

By Bjorn Nansen

In his study of the effects of speed, Paul Virilio articulates a theory of the “accident” that locates the destructive side effects and loss produced by and immanent to technoscientific development across transportation, communication and medical technologies. This paper considers this thesis through an analysis of the nexus formed between the body and the mechanical ventilator, mobilising the framework of Bruno Latour and actor-network theory to argue the body is not discrete, but continuous with a heterogeneous range of materials and technologies. This approach exposes the accident to a range of ambivalences and possibilities, broadening it beyond Virilio’s limited and negative definition. The accident, then, is not simply something that happens to bodies, but rather is something that is integral to the body.

Toxic Shock: Gendered Environments and Embodied Knowledge in Don DeLillo’s White Noise and Todd Haynes’s [Safe]

By Rachel Carroll

Don De Lillo's 1984 novel White Noise and Todd Haynes’s 1995 film [Safe] both depict "toxic events" which prompt crises of the body and of knowledge: the boundaries between normative and transgressive gendered identities and between legitimate and illicit knowledges are questioned. Moreover, in both texts the body and identity of a woman becomes the focus of this questioning; the ways in which these toxic events are acted out through the bodies of women reveals the implication of discourses of toxicity in discourses of feminine embodiment. Both Babette in White Noise and Carol in [Safe] suffer symptoms without cause, whose meaning the (masculine) discourses of medicine and psychiatry cannot articulate; they are converted from exemplars of normative gendered and sexual identity into deviants whose bodies exhibit a silent protest. In depicting the projection of crises of toxicity onto the body of a woman, these texts illustrate the persistence of cultural narratives which pathologise the female body and hystericize feminine subjectivity; the "authenticity" and "legitimacy" of a woman's experience of a crisis of embodiment is placed in question by dominant cultural narratives which construct feminine subjectivity as incapable of self-knowledge and female materiality as irrational. By placing the discourse of toxicity in these texts in the context of discourses of feminine embodiment, especially those of consumption (bodily and economic) and of pathology, I intend to explore how these conspiracies of the female body prompt crises of masculine knowledge, discourse and power.

Calculated Uncertainty: Computers, Chance Encounters, and "Community" in the Work of Cedric Price

By Rowan Wilken

Iconoclastic British architect and theorist Cedric Price is noted for the comparatively early incorporation of computing and other communications technologies into his designs, which he employed as part of an ongoing critique of the conventions of architectural form, and as part of his explorations of questions of mobility. Three key unrealised projects of his are examined here which explore these concerns. These are his “Potteries Thinkbelt” (1964-67), “Generator” (1978-80), and “Fun Palace” (1961-74). This paper explores his use of computing and communications equipment in these projects, as well as the theoretical influences (including systems theory and cybernetics) that informed his approach to designing them. These influences, it will be argued, are interesting for the way that Price employed them in the development of a structurally complex and programmatically rich architectural environment which was, simultaneously (and somewhat paradoxically), to be an “accidental environment”. In examining his work and evaluating its lasting significance, two arguments are developed. First, it is argued that Price's work is significant for its engagement with the self-contradictory idea of the “prepared accident”, in which meticulous planning and preparation are employed in order to encourage chance, serendipity, and accident. Secondly, it is argued that Price's work is important for its theoretical rigour and its early incorporation of computing and communications technologies. More specifically, his Fun Palace project in particular is significant as an early exploration of experimental forms of technologically mediated social interaction.

The Accidental Topology of Digital Culture: How the Network Becomes Viral

By Tony Sampson

Drawing upon recent empirical studies carried out in the field of complex networks and Deleuzeguattarian assemblage theory, this article argues that by grasping the composition of what appears to be an increasingly accidental topology, we can enhance our understanding of digital network culture. Contrary to those authors who have pointed to the cold war origins of the Internet (a manifestation of network power) as an essential property that seemingly structures network identity, this article explores the role of the unessential in the open-ended evolution of network culture. By doing so, the author sets out to challenge the causality afforded to essences by considering the role of unforeseen emergent properties and the mode in which the action of subsequent future events and accidents can inversely impact upon the unity of network identity.

The article initially situates viral vulnerability as an unforeseen emergent property, which evidently destabilises the axiomatic robustness of the network. According to assemblage theory, such topological properties can emerge from the symbiotic interactions that can occur between the material and expressive components of an assemblage producing new territories, which in turn interface with the assemblage - decoding, deterritorializing and transforming its topology. It is argued here that network vulnerability is actualised within the complex topological interactions that occur between capitalist network power and a social multiplicity (the multitude). In this process of transformation novel topological properties emerge that can trigger seemingly anomalous future events and accidents, like viral contagion and spam pollution. These events and accidents are as much a part of the network composition as the planned events found in its militarised history. In this way, they replace essential causality with a mode of fuzzy intermediate determinism described by DeLanda as “laying between the two extremes of a complete fatalism, based on simple and linear causal relations, and a complete indeterminism” (Deleuze and the Open-ended Becoming of the World). Indeed, Deleuze argues that the divergent actualisation of topological forms “takes place entirely within the unessential” (Difference and Repetition 189). It is this machinic process that ensures that the identity of capitalist network power is never absolutely guaranteed.

Accidental Participation in Control, in the Small of Society

By Don Winiecki

The concept of “control society” arises from the post-structural formulations of a group of late 20th century philosophers and social theorists whose investigations into particular institutions in society show how definable regimes of thought and rationality come into being and become “normal”. These studies provide models that, when taken together, gesture toward an encompassing regime of thought, rationality and institutionalised action over Western society – what has been called “control society”. However, with few exceptions, studies of control environments take a high and abstracted view of the possibilities immanent in such a consolidation of rational regimes of thought and action. This paper responds to this gap in the literature to show how individuals participate in the accidental production of elements of “control” through their actions in the small, inter-institutional spaces of society.

issue 13 — Making Badlands

Places            Past            Disappearance

By Ross Gibson

In this address, I think out loud about the work we need to do with history in order to understand better how to live well in the present and future. I call this process “vestige work”. Rummaging in Australia’s aftermath cultures, I try to re-dress the disintegration in our story-systems, in our traditional knowledge caches, our landscapes and ecologies. My job is to investigate and recuperate scenes and collections of artifacts that have been torn apart somehow, torn by landgrabbing, let’s say, or by accidents, or exploitation that ignores rituals of preservation and restoration. Typically, the scenes and systems I investigate were once a good deal more coherent, but now they are ailing or out of balance. I’ve come to understand that most of Australia is like this, that the place we inhabit is our best evidence about our unbalanced selves and that this place has so much raggedness in it because it is patterned to the society that has used it so roughly.

Ghosts in the Landscape

By Phillip Roe

This paper sets out to explore the relationships between language, landscape, representation, photography and writing. It does so by taking a particular place through which these streams intersect – the vast, million-year-old salt lake known as Lake Ballard in the heart of the Goldfields region of Western Australia. What complicates this landscape and its representation is the fact that this place is also the site of a significant art installation – in 2003, British sculptor Antony Gormely developed his Inside Australia installation at Lake Ballard, as part of the 2003 Perth International Arts Festival. This paper invokes the notion of the ghost from Jacques Derrida as a means of exploring the way Gormely's figures haunt, not so much the landscape itself, but the very discourses that have previously articulated the means of its representation.

Our place: in-between the primordial and the latter?

By Ashley Holmes

In his study of Central Queensland’s ‘Horror Stretch’ Ross Gibson elucidates the truism that a landscape is established somewhere in-between the physical geography and its cultural overlays. This paper analyses my own approach to places as a post-colonial migrant and artist. As a transient, I often get to know a place on what I perceive to be its own terms. Even as I observe vegetable, animal and human elements, the form of the geology is perceived as features, relative scales, spaces and, distances. The remnant surface litter is conveyed as patterns and textures. During these moments a fundamental sense of place is established. This may be vague or fleeting. It may be protean. If the impression is significant it may lead to a desire to linger, to return and so, an ongoing relationship with a place may ensue. Subsequently arises a desire to seek out cultural knowledge. Then genius loci becomes compound. It is difficult to deny or mitigate Gibson’s tragic interpretation of the human contribution to landscape. There is certainly tragic irony in that, at this point in Earth's geological time, it may be easier to imagine a possible future Earth without life than to apprehend the primordial state.

Domestic Imaginings

By Saffron Newey

The movement from public to domestic space is discursive as well as physical. In my paintings I explore this transitional zone. I model this idea both in my choice of images and in the way that I work with the ambiguous relationship between painting and photography.

Frames and borderlines are architecturally present in the structure of a home however this paper considers how these borderlines can dually exist as a metaphor for the psychological states of the public and private self.

The aesthetics of photography and painting are intertwined in my visual work to set up a tension for the viewer. The image is at once, framed and autonomous, yet like a trompe l’oeil portal, open to the projection of the viewer. The notion of a “badlands” in my image making is hauntingly implied by transient borders and undefined perspectives.

Ley Lines

By Sharon Thorne

This paper investigates a peripheral space within the city of Melbourne which until the 21st century escaped the jurisdiction of any Melbourne Authority. Although geographically situated at the confluence of the Maribyrnong and Yarra Rivers , and bordered by the main road to the West and the Railroad; neither the Railways, the Harbour Trust, the MMBW, the City Council, nor the Crown Lands Dept. had responsibility for this land.

Unfolding the repressed history of this space from the early days of white settlement, when the Aboriginal population were shunted to this unwanted swampland, the paper examines the processes of change at work on this site over the past two centuries, as it has evolved from the periphery to the front line of the new docklands precinct. From tip site to shantytown during the Depression, to wasteland, and now in the 21st century, to invaluable real estate, the historical and contemporary sense of Dudley Flats alters, as its identity swings from the otherness of destitution to the otherness of elitism.

As a landscape haunted by displacement, loss and waste, the everyday lives of the women who inhabited this site during the Depression are taken up in my art practice. Themes of ‘making do' ‘getting by' scrounging and scavenging as Aussie traditions that flourished on this site are examined in light of my own creative process.

Making Badlands All Over the World: Local Knowledge and Global Power

By Steve Butler

Bob Hawke's recent proposal for turning Australia's “dead heart” into the world's nuclear waste dump is a classic example of badland making and a timely reminder of the relevance of Ross Gibson‘s Seven Versions of an Australian Badland (2002). Closer to my home, in Central Queensland, a controversy is raging about globally significant developments in the Shoalwater Bay Military Training Area.

Australia (if not the whole world) may well be a badland in the making. The ways in which a powerful institution exploits a place is intimately related to pre-existing ideas (myths and assumptions) about that place. Ross Gibson asks us to seek “something good we can do in response to the bad in our lands” (3). One response begins by asking: is the badness in the land or does it reside elsewhere? If we analyze the discourses and practices of the various agencies and institutions governing the badland we may be able to formulate useful tactics of resistance to their strategies of domination.

“I wish I was anywhere but here”: “Structure of address” in the badlands

By Constance Ellwood

This paper discusses an active production, as a badlands, of the suburb of Macquarie Fields, in the western region of Sydney. It draws on media representations of the riots which took place there in early 2005, on policing strategies for youth, and on government planning and policy practices. By juxtaposing these representations, strategies and practices with the long history of attempts by residents to seek change, the paper situates these riots as a meaningful act of resistance to a dominant ordering. The paper uses Judith Butler’s notion of structure of address to consider the ways in which the riots amount to an address by residents. The failure by governments to take this address seriously means that the terms of a basic moral authority are not met.

Badlands at the Bedside: Fact or Fiction

By Wendy Madsen

Professional nurses began to emerge as an identifiable group from the late nineteenth century. Their establishment and eventual domination of nursing was characterised by separation and antagonism as they asserted themselves over untrained nurses. This paper examines the struggle for professional domination as it occurred in Australia during the early twentieth century, and particularly focuses on the accusations of unsafe practice levelled at untrained nurses. This tactic drew on public images of untrained nurses depicted by nineteenth century authors such as Charles Dickens – of gin-swilling nurses who would not wait until the patient had died before pilfering the belongings. Thus, a “badlands” concept was created in the minds of professional nurses, whereby untrained nurses at the bedside in private homes were actively endangering the lives of their patients because of lack of skill and knowledge. However, recent historical research has increasingly challenged such images, and suggests that while many nurses did not have formal training, they were not necessarily unsafe or ineffective in their practice.

issue 12 — Rethinking Regionality

f2f 2 url & b ond: space/time and the dissemination of community

By Darren Tofts

This paper addresses a simple question: what is space/time in an age of converged media? The rapid development of mobile networks of mediation has expanded the notion of ambiguous presence associated with the internet and other telematic networks. This paper seeks to review this expansion of telepresence in the context of residual debates to do with centre and periphery, town and country, urban and regional. It also seeks to critically examine questions to do with identity that arise from distributed networks and the modes of largely text based, abbreviated discourse they engender. Do such networks promote collective ideals of community, consistent with the rhetoric associated with the age of "new media"? Or do they distribute or disseminate the very notion of community to such a degree that the opposite is true? Are we witnessing the rise of a new individualism?

‘[Captain Cook):(Re-Births):(Byron Bay]’

By Terry Maybury

'[Captain Cook):(Re-Births):(Byron Bay]' is a re-imagining of the Endeavour's famous voyage of discovery up the east coast of Australia in 1770, particularly in relation to its sighting of the Northern Rivers region of New South Wales. Its key question asks how the highly contextualised semantic order Cook brought to the region is related to the kind of order discernible in Byron Bay and the surrounding area today. In essence, does Cook's naming of Cape Byron (and subsequently, the locality that clings to it - Byron Bay), and the Northern River's most significant landscape feature - Mount Warning (remembering that both these acts of naming were carried out from the context of the Endeavour's oceanic perspective), still have some resonance today? How might this prominent voyage of discovery be recast, or is its legendary status set in stone? Might it be possible for those resident in the region (and possibly elsewhere) to become electronic avatars of the ship's celebrated captain, perhaps Joseph Banks, maybe one of the ship's crew, or even one of the on-shore Aborigines of the period, to see if we could (both personally and collectively) re-imagine a different semantic order for the landscape and culture of the Northern Rivers, now as much a global region as a national one? Indeed, is this semantic re-imagining possible for the whole continent of Australia itself?

The edges of the earth: critical regionalism as an aesthetics of the singular

By Warwick Mules

This paper engages in a critical reflection on regionality as a discursive space interfused with and exceeded by singular aesthetic experience. Rejecting models of power based on centre/periphery models, the paper develops a concept of "earth" as the grounding and ungrounding of experience within global informational fields, as the openness of experience to the outside. To be earthed is to be subject to trauma, or the effects of the delayed return of a primary contact. As "original" material (as home, as ground) the earth retains itself, but only through a traumatic exposure to its own dematerialisation. Developing key ideas of singularity, exposure and contact by Jean-Luc Nancy, the paper proposes a practice of "contact aesthetics" the aim of which is to respond to the problem that the body has in its capacity to unify itself in the affective-perceptual world in which it is immersed. The problem posed for experience within the global milieu is not one of unity, but one of contact: how does a body remain in contact with itself, and with others to which it feels an affinity? An aesthetics of experience would be concerned with the problem of contact, by making bodies affective to one another within emerging globalised fields. The paper discusses the issue of a contact aesthetics in terms of regional spaces and experiences accessed genealogically and archivally-a "regionalism" not only at the periphery, but also at the very heart of "centred" experience.

Regionality and New Media Art

By Grayson Cooke and Dea Morgain

This paper is a discussion of our work in new media art and photography since moving to the Wide Bay / Burnett region of South East Queensland - a 'regional' area, and one significantly different from the urban environments both of us had inhabited up until our move. As well as outlining some of the issues facing new media art in regional areas, this paper describes our attempt to produce work that reflects our impressions of this region, that responds to and challenges notions of regionality, and that seeks to find a role for new media art in the regional context.

Ghostwriting: The Alkimos and its Ghosts

By Phillip Roe

Ghostwriting is comprised of two texts — a conventional article and a new media artwork. Both texts attempt to work the notion of ghostwriting as the trace of a residual figurality through the use of the "ghostship" Alkimos and its relation to the Australian landscape. The ghost, figured through both Derrida's notion of the ghost as that which haunts all concepts and the specificity of the "ghost" of Alkimos, haunts the margins of the Australian coastline. The two texts should to be read together.

issue 11 — Edges and Centres: Contemporary Experience and Lifestyle

Luce Irigaray's Sensible Transcendental: Becoming Divine in the Body

By Agnes Bosanquet

This paper explores the transformative possibilities of everyday life experiences through Luce Irigaray's call to become divine women (and men). The paradoxical construction of the sensible transcendental is Irigaray's attempt to imagine a divinity that would be an "inscription in the flesh" (An Ethics of Sexual Difference 147). The paper considers an alternative language for such an understanding, including Romain Rolland's oceanic feeling and Catherine Clement's syncope, both of which locate a sense of a beyond in everyday experience. In contrast to previous readings of Irigaray's divine, which have focussed on the subjectivity offered by the sensible transcendental, I argue that the divine is primarily a passage of becoming and transformation that can be understood as operating intersubjectively. How might we experience such a becoming? The paper offers the examples of free diving, reading and writing to demonstrate an embodied divinity.

Scandinavian Dreams: DIY, Democratisation and IKEA

By Buck Clifford Rosenberg

This article seeks to examine the viability of using IKEA as a metaphor to discuss recent socio-cultural trends within consumer society. Through an analysis of IKEA's business practice of "democratic design"—which refers to the production of elite modernist furnishings for a mass culture—the article explores the blurring of formerly distinct class cultures related to the consumption of elite modernist-design and mass-cultural furnishings. It situates this discussion within the wider framework of cultural democratisation. The article also examines the self-assembly nature of IKEA's furniture to highlight specific cultural trends. The self-assembly furniture is considered in light of wider trends towards privatisation and individualisation. In addition, it focuses upon the role of self-assembly as part of DIY home culture, which is simultaneously classified as a mode of "productive leisure." Finally, the article examines the constitutive role of self-assembly and DIY in the production of the self.

I've never ever felt like that in my life before ... never ever felt that intense : penetration of the male body as transformative experience

By Terry Evans

This paper explores the sexual penetration of the heterosexually identifying male body as transformative experience in terms of masculine subjectivity. It draws from the work of Eve Sedgwick and other queer theorists who have argued that gender, sexuality and desire are constituted through multiple social discourses and that by pushing the limits of taken for granted binarisms such as the hetero/homosexual definition new meanings and subjectivities become possible. Football as a masculine and masculinising practice is presented as containing homosexual subtexts that allude to possibilities of desire. Interview transcripts from heterosexually identifying men who have sex with men are also provided to illustrate the transformative power of the experience of being sexually penetrated. The conclusion from this work is that what separates heterosexuality from homosexuality is not desire but is homophobia understood as the fear of being constituted as homosexual within hegemonic masculine discourses in which homosexuality is culturally excluded.

Cyberharassment and Online Defamation: a Default Form of Regulations?

By Julie Dare

The notion of freedom of expression is a fundamental principle of democratic societies, and perhaps nowhere is this more clearly articulated and defended than on the Internet. Developed upon laissez-faire principles that characterised the American frontier, the Internet has become strongly identified with a particularly liberal interpretation of free speech rights. However, studies into computer-mediated communication ( CMC ) suggest the promotion of liberal free speech rights has contributed to a contemporary Internet culture that both facilitates and accepts as 'normal' an adversarial style of interaction, that has the potential to degenerate into abuse and online defamation. In such situations the right to freedom of expression for some individuals may be severely compromised. This is illustrated in the case study Cullen v White, which explores the impact of a sustained and malicious campaign of online harassment and defamation on both an individual, and more laterally the electronic public sphere. This case study highlights the danger this more insidious form of 'regulation' poses to free speech rights and a healthy electronic public sphere, and draws parallels between the impact of online harassment and defamation, and the oft-quoted dangers posed to freedom of expression by opportunistic defamation law suits designed to 'chill' speech.

Drawing on Turner: Liminal engagements between artists, advocates and refugees in regional Western Australia.

By F Tilbury, Y Toussaint and A Davis

Early in 2005 a collection of art works by members of the community of the "Great Southern" region of Western Australia was displayed in an art exhibition entitled "Liminal". This paper explores the process of the development of the concept of liminality for the exhibition, with a particular focus on the ways in which members of a local Afghan Hazara community and members of the mainstream community, who advocate on their behalf, were encouraged to participate. It returns to the original anthropological concept of liminality, as developed by Victor Turner, to help understand the artists' framing of the connection between them and the Afghan asylum seekers as characters who are in some ways 'liminal,' on the margins of the mainstream. Using the case study of the art exhibition as an example, we argue for a core/periphery dynamism which produces a creative potential within rural communities, enabling them to challenge the norms of mainstream Australia.

issue 10 — Media Communities: Local Voices

Wireless World: Global Perspectives on Community Radio

By Kevin Howley

This paper places a discussion of community radio in the context of ongoing debates surrounding 'globalization.'At first blush, this may seem an odd tack to take given community radio's theoretical relevance to and practical application in local settings. Indeed, community radio is generally defined in terms of its service to populations within discrete geographic locations (Price-Davies & Tacchi 50-51). Yet, as media scholar David Hendy reminds us, radio, an ostensibly local medium, is very much a global phenomenon inasmuch as radio technology is ubiquitous, the medium is pervasive in industrialised and developing societies alike, and the industry is increasingly transnational in its scale and scope.

“A Gang of Leftists with a Website: The Indymedia Movement”

By Jon R. Pike

The Independent Media Center Movement, an international media activist movement born during the World Trade Organization protests in 1999, has since grown to more than 100 local collectives in over 40 countries. It is dedicated to the production of media texts, mostly on the Internet, organized along non-hierarchical, consensual lines. Their production of media can best be understood through the radical education theories of Freire and the new social movement theories of Melucci. From a Freirean perspective, this movement educates people in creating media relevant to their own lives and frees them from a consumer-based media economy which regards them as mere objects to be exploited. From Malacca, this movement shows evidence of “hidden networks” that maintains a movement collective identity, affective bonds and periods of latency and mobilization. This study examined one Indy media collective through the use of ethnographic techniques.

A Curious Case of American Exceptionalism: Ideology, Policy and Practice in American, Australian and Canadian Community Radio

By Charles Fairchild

Community radio in the United States has been struggling from crisis to crisis throughout most of the last decade. Yet, the community radio sectors in many other countries have not experienced anything like the difficulties faced in the U.S. In some countries the opposite is true. There are three main causes of the problems community radio faces in the U.S.: a hostile broadcasting environment defined by an extreme form of deregulation and the absolute dominance of commercial media over broadcasting law and policy, the lack of a clear and effective policy to define and govern community radio and the lack of effective community outreach and mobilization of existing community support. When compared with community radio in Australia and Canada , solutions to the difficulties faced in the U.S. become easier to envision and the lessons of the American experience can be made useful for those participating in community radio in other countries.

A Thumbnail Dipped in Tar …
The resuscitation of a remote rural community newspaper using the Distributed Newsroom model.

By Chris Capel and John Cokley

Residents of the remote central-western Queensland town of Blackall (pop. 1,833) watched their last locally reported and produced newspaper close in 2001. The nearest newspapers in the intervening years had been and continue to be controlled and produced from Longreach, 200km to the north-west, and in Charleville, another 300km to the south-east. In 2002, a group of Blackall residents formed a committee and asked local officers of the Queensland Department of Primary Industries (DPI) to help them in a project to start a new locally controlled and produced newspaper. Through the DPI, they also approached journalism lecturer John Cokley at James Cook University, Townsville, for advice and assistance. This article documents subsequent preparation for, and publication of, a pilot newspaper called The Barcoo Independent on October 24, 2003, and evaluation by survey, email and telephone interview.

Community radio in post-apartheid South Africa: The case of Bush Radio in Cape Town

By Tanja Bosch

This paper deals with the community in "community radio", with specific reference to community radio station Bush Radio, located in Cape Town, South Africa. Firstly, this paper provides a history of Bush Radio, tracing its roots as a cassette production facility, to one of South Africa's new community stations after the end of apartheid. Looking at different conceptions of "community", this paper traces how Bush Radio approaches and perceives the concept; and how through its rhizomatic nature, it both builds community and builds bridges between artificially constructed communities. Using Deleuze and Guatarri's theory of rhizomatics, and Victor Turner's concept of communitas, this paper argues that community radio, and the community within, is best understood through an alternative theoretical framework. In particular, rhizomatics help us to understand community radio as a network of connections across which things flow and disperse.

Transforming Communities: Community Journalism in Africa

By Robert C. Moore and Tamara L. Gillis

Changes in the media landscape of sub-Saharan Africa and possibilities for increased citizen empowerment and social interaction are facilitated through the integration of community journalism and community media as process and mechanism. Citizens of the world are experiencing greater news and information services that affect the decisions of everyday life. Yet, in Sub-Saharan Africa, for the first time in their lives, citizens have the opportunity to engage in a partnership with media that allows people in diverse geographic settings to share in decision-making concerning issues that affect their future. This paper defines the concepts of community journalism and community media and shows how these concepts are able to make a difference in the lives of people.

Grassroots media practices in Greece: a sociological approach

By Pantelis Vatikiotis

The paper explores diverse grassroots media practices that are implemented 'on the margins' of the conventional public domain in Greece, drawing both on their contribution to the wider public sphere (what is called here the 'spatial' aspect), and on their intervention in the sphere of politics (what is called here the aspect of 'agency'), pointing out their implications for Greek civic life. By evaluating the practice of these projects (originated from 'below') in a resonant context that prioritises the 'agents', the paper highlights both the challenges and the limits of these initiatives in their own terms.

Is anybody reading this? Indymedia and internet traffic reports

By Andy Opel and Rich Templin

This paper examines the Internet server traffic reports of eight North American Indymedia websites from January to May 2003 in an attempt to address the question of audience research and alternative media. The traffic reports indicate a significant increase in traffic at all of these websites beginning in March 2003, the month when open hostilities broke out in Iraq. These results suggest a connection between Indymedia and mobilization. In addition, further research based on Internet server traffic reports is described and encouraged.

issue 9 — Independent Articles 2005

Conflicting Imaginary Places in a Local Environmental Dispute

By Elizabeth Eddy

In 2000, a local conflict on the Sunshine Coast emerged over a proposed road development. The three kilometer dirt road was bordered by a national park on one side, and on the other, by the new university campus and residential estate. The development of this road along its current route would place a permanent road barrier between the University campus nature reserve and the National Park, but would provide a second access road for the estate. A public meeting was arranged by the local shire council to discuss an alternative route supported by the University. This paper examines the debate about this proposal at the public meeting, to explain the basis upon which the local residents supported the developer's plan to develop the road along its current route, against the natural values arguments put forward by the University for a wildlife corridor. It draws upon recent scholarship on environmental conflict to identify two distinct "imaginary places" which underpinned the conflicting positions in this debate, each of which attributed different meanings to the road and to the differing spatial boundaries in which the road was located.

issue 8 — Regions of Sexuality

Paedophilia and the Misrecognition of Desire

By Steven Angelides

Within the last fifteen years there has been nothing short of an explosion of cultural panic regarding issues of paedophilia. Indeed, according to both the Australian Federal Police and the US Federal Bureau of Investigation, paedophiles and paedophile networks are a 'growing threat'. This paper is not concerned with adjudicating the question of whether the cultural incidence of paedophilia is increasing. Instead, it is aims to interrogate the conceptual ground upon which recent efforts to identify the 'paedophile' and paedophilic activity have pivoted. The hegemonic domain for the propagation of paedophilia research has been the field of abnormal psychology. The paper argues that this field has profoundly 'misrecognised' paedophilia. It proposes that the field of abnormal psychology must engage psychoanalytic, feminist, and deconstructive theories of sexuality and identity, and that it must resist the temptation to affix an ontological essence to the 'paedophile'. The paper concludes with the suggestion that only when research methodologies take seriously the question of the prevalence of intergenerational sexual desire in the general population can we even begin to understand paedophilia.

Keywords: paedophilia; sexuality; child sexual abuse; psychoanalysis; deconstruction; feminist theory.

The Measure of 'Sexual Dysfunction': A Plea for Theoretical Limitlessness

By Lisa Downing

This article submits the concept of 'sexual dysfunction', as it is used in sexological and psychiatric diagnostic manuals, to deconstructive reading using the insights of gender and queer theory (especially Michel Foucault and Judith Butler). It shows up the culturally and historically relative meanings of diagnoses of sexual disorders, by demonstrating how the institution of psychiatry has bowed to the changing face of political agency when classifying pathological sexualities (the case of homosexuality). The article then proceeds, by examining extreme models of sexual desire, such as sado-masochism and 'asphyxiophilia', to challenge both the logic of dys/functionality and the model of sexual agency offered by progressive discourses such as queer theory. It argues for a radical 'tarrying with the negative' as a foil to the persuasive lure of 'bio-politics' which delimits sexuality as either 'good' (life-driven) or 'bad' (death-dealing). The conclusion warns of the dangers both of classifying sexuality according to taxonomy and of privileging sexual 'fluidity' over 'fixity', because both strategies risk shoring up historically redundant meanings and generating the possibility of unforeseen societal interpretations.

Keywords: Sexual dysfunction, critique of; gender theory; queer theory; history of psychiatry; Foucault, Michel; paraphilia

Locating Third Sexes

By M. Morgan Holmes

Seeking to answer the question 'Where do intersexed persons fit in the world?' the essay examines anthropological knowledge production and debates about the existence and significance of so-called 'third' sexes and/or genders. Concern is given to problems of colonialist and masculinist conceptualisations of third sex/gender in a variety of socio-cultural contexts, and feminist critique of that material is launched. This paper is concerned with the limits of oppositional thinking about the construction of sexed subjects, and with the challenge of relaying knowledge about divergent sex/gender systems to readers who may never have the opportunity to see for themselves how different cultures operate. The paper argues that it is overly simplistic to see societies with more than two sex/gender categories as superior to those that divide the world into just two. To understand whether a system is more or less oppressive we have to understand how it treats its various members. Glossing over that information impoverishes the information to which scholars unable to (re)visit specific sociocultural locations have access

Keywords: Third sex; third gender; intersexuality; queer theory; identity politics

Being-Exposed: 'The Poetics of Sex' and Other Matters of Tact

By Nikki Sullivan

The aim of this paper is to challenge the logic of regional boundaries as it manifests itself in literary studies, sexuality studies and sexual practices, and humanist understandings of subjectivity and sociality. It achieves this aim by performatively evoking the sensuous exposure to the other that engenders and is engendered by reading, writing, being, and that exceeds the limits of ontological and conceptual boundaries even as it institutes what Derrida refers to as 'the limit'. Drawing on the writings of Jean-Luc Nancy and Jeannette Winterson-in particular three texts which touch me, which move me in powerful and yet inexplicable ways-I raise the question of how to respond without uncritically employing the codes and conventions associated with already established conceptual systems and/or fields of knowledge such as those listed above. My response, my paper, could be said to constitute both a critical ontology in the Foucauldian sense-it is not, 'a doctrine, nor a permanent body of knowledge that is accumulating … but an analysis of the limits that are imposed on us and an experiment with the possibility of going beyond them'-and a sensuous encounter, an exposure to the illimitable alterity of the other that (with any luck) repeats the call to respond.

Keywords: Touch; writing; limit; inter-subjectivity; textuality; Nancy, Jean-Luc; Winterson, Jeanette

issue 7 — New Media Technologies

News Connections: Regional newspapers and the Web

By Jacqui Ewart

This paper examines key discussions occurring in relation to three issues currently affecting the news media both globally and locally. They are: an apparent disconnection between the media and their publics; declines in circulation and readership; and the increasing role and influence of new technologies on news media. These issues are considered in the global context and applied at the local level through an examination of their impact on, and consequences for, regional newspapers in Queensland. The study reviews the websites of Queensland regional newspapers and suggests methods by which these publications might use the web to address the issues they face. In particular, the paper focuses on ways of connecting regional newspaper readers, especially geographically disperse publics, with each other, regional journalists and newspapers.

Key terms: Web, regional newspapers, technology, disconnections, public, regional journalists.

Weblogs, warblogs, the public sphere, and bubbles

By Garry Thompson

During the past two years, weblogs have come to the attention of the public via mass media as a rhetorical form between private and public. The ease with which weblogs are created and maintained extends the Internet’s potential for democraticised access; recent news events in the US, specifically the brief scandal surrounding US Senator Lott and the war against Iraq, have provided a sense of weblogs’ capability to influence discussion of events in a virtual public sphere. However, the large numbers and openly ideological quality of weblogs tend to limit their audiences to those who agree with their points of view, keeping writers and readers in bubble-like isolation from opposing perspectives.

Key terms: Weblogs, warblogs, public sphere, internet, news, discourse, opinion.

What's Happening? Mobile Communication Technology and the Surveillance Function of News

By Collette Snowden

This paper discusses the argument that news has an important “surveillance function” that allows people to monitor the environment for both threats and events of interest in the context of the widespread and increasing use of mobile communications technology (MCT). It also discusses some of the issues that will arise for the production of news and information in relation to the use of MCT.

Key terms: mobile communication technology, surveillance, news, media, telepresence, mobile privatisation.

New Media Technologies and the Making of the New Global Reporter

By Geoff Craig

This article considers the figure of the new global reporter and her/his engagement with new media technologies. Through a discussion of the Urban Jungle Pack and the working environment and culture of Bloomberg financial news reporters, the article argues that while the work of contemporary reporters is partly defined by the uses of new technologies, it more fundamentally involves the production of a journalistic self. There is, then, an emphasis in this paper on the human figure of the reporter and an understanding that the job of reporting involves the manufacture of contexts, or fields of proof, where personal and professional skills work together with technological validation.

Key terms: Reporters, new technologies, urban Jungle Pack, Bloomberg, reporting practices.

The Backyard Blitz Syndrome: the emerging student culture in Australian Higher Education

By Judith Langridge

This paper discusses the transformation of the learning/teaching culture in a tertiary education environment brought about by the evolution and application of digital communication technology. In examining how technological development has altered the way in which study materials are delivered to, and accessed by students this paper outlines changes observed in student attitudes to the tertiary learning experience over a ten-year period at a regional university.

The paper argues that an intensely private and absorbing multimedia world has emerged in which many contemporary university students – acculturated as they are to an electronic visual environment – acquire information in short chunks as and when they need it. It also argues for the possible use of the technology that has helped create this cultural construct – The Backyard Blitz syndrome – to transform the way in which academics interact with multimedia savvy students in order to engage their interest in studying theoretical material they often find boring and irrelevant to their needs.

Key terms: Higher education, teaching culture, digital communication technology, online learning, regional university, student engagement.

The Technology, Aesthetic and Cultural Politics of a Collaborative, Transnational Music Recording Project: Veiga, Veiga and the Itinerant Overdubs

By Denis Crowdy and Karl Neuenfeldt

This article describes and analyses the aesthetic, technological and cultural processes informing the cultural production of 'Veiga, Veiga' a song recorded by 73-year-old Australian Torres Strait Islander, Henry (Seaman) Dan. The song in its 'final' version appears on his CD Perfect Pearl recorded and released in 2003. However, achieving that version required considerable collaboration, but often at-a-distance, between songwriters, musicians and producers based in Australia (Cairns, Sydney and Thursday Island) and Papua New Guinea (Port Moresby). The main foci here are the process of collaboration and also the assumptions and challenges of cultural production. It discusses the essential use of multi-track digital recording software to the recording of 'Veiga, Veiga'. In the multi-track musical recording process used to produce the song, primarily Protools™ software, the relatively new technology was used to good effect to facilitate trans-national and cross-cultural collaboration.

Key terms: ethnomusicology, world music, collaboration, new media, cultural production, recording.

issue 6 — Gender In Asia

"A Mirror For Men?" Idealised Depictions of White Men and Gay Men in Japanese Women's Media

By Mark McLelland

This paper argues that Japanese women's media which portray images of foreign (nearly always white) men and Japanese gay men as objects of desire and fascination for Japanese women function as rhetorical mirrors whose real intent is to reflect back the supposed deficiencies of 'traditional' Japanese men. The paper concludes that women's media are being used as a vehicle for anti-male rhetoric, a channel for an indirect discourse of complaint whose main purpose is to critique the perceived shortcomings of ordinary Japanese men.

Key terms: Japan, masculinity, homosexuality, women, media.

Asian women artists: A local and global perspective

By Andrea Ash

In this paper, I focus on contemporary Asian art that deals with images of women, by women or about women. I canvas issues pertinent to the position of women and art production in the social setting of contemporary Asia and Asian Diaspora. I begin with a brief historical discussion of images of Asian women as traditional, masculine and Western. In recent times nudity and eroticism has had mixed reactions in the Asian public realm. Many contemporary Asian women artists have turned to the female body as a primary subject of the female experience. Gender, sexuality and power are distinct sites of struggle in the politics of difference for Asian women artists. Western modernist and colonialist presumptions, however, still persist in many cultural institutions. The local and global contexts of Asian women artists and their creations are seen as contested sites. As an exemplar in this paper, the exhibition Text and Subtext: Contemporary Art and Asian Women provides a critical framework that suggests provocative ways of rethinking contemporary art created by Asian women in which identity and cultural practice are to be conceived. Contemporary women artists in a local and global realm have demarcated a critical space for the articulation of a transnational Asian culture.

Key terms: Asian art, Diaspora, Women Artists, Gender, Identity.

On the Forest Fringes?: Environmentalism, Left Politics and Feminism in Japan

By Mike Danaher

This article examines the inter-relationships between environmentalism, left-wing politics and feminism in Japan. Using a historical perspective, the article identifies alliances and significant areas of influence between these three social and political movements. The article concludes that there exists support networks between the three that are important to maintaining their vitality and membership. The article also finds a lack of a wider vision characterising these movements.

Key terms: environmental movement, LDP, Japanese Socialists, Seikatsu Club.

Gendered Spaces: Women in Burmese Society

By Than Than Nwe

In many ways, historically and today, women of Burma hold a unique and enviable position. At home and in business activities, women in Burmese society compared to women in its two historically powerful neighbours, India and China, have greater legal rights (traditionally, equal to that of men) and enjoy a high degree of tolerance and independence. Yet, on the other hand, there is strong evidence of gender-specific cultural practices that undermine this apparent equality. This is sanctioned by the Buddhist religion, of which the paper provides an insightful view of; of Theravada Buddhism’s influence on gender divisions and how these divisions are expressed and the boundaries defined in private and public spaces.

Key terms: Juxtaposition of equity and inequity, Geographic space, Theravada Buddhist societies, concept of hpon, Spatial division, Spiritual hierarchy.

issue 5 — Regional Landscapes

Selling the Suburbs: Nature, Landscape, Adverts, Community

By Dennis Wood

This essay discusses how the real-and-imagined spaces of ‘nature’ are used to promote the burgeoning master planned communities or enclave estates. On one hand it focuses on the actual sites of the estates and discusses how nature, as a construct, plays a prominent role in presenting the estate as a place of ‘wholesome community values’. It then goes on to discuss how ‘nature’ as a concept is used in various advertisements to promote these community values as a sales tool.

Key terms: Community, enclave estates, firstspace and secondspace, imagineering, nature.

Wildflowers and Other Landscapes

By Stephanie Green

“Wildflowers and Other Landscapes” explores, issues of difference, gender, the field of vision, the body, the landscape in Australia, and the way we write, mark and imagine the land. The piece begins from my own bodily experience of living in this country. Along with other non-Indigenous Australians I carry with me many questions about belonging: where do I belong?; where are my people?; what is my place? As a white woman where do I have the right to go? I am an urban dweller: what is my relationship with country? The paper is presented as a meditation on these questions, attempting to link and move between associated experiences and ideas. The challenging painting on found tarpaulin, entitled “Wildflower”, by Western Australian artist Jo Darbyshire, provides a touchstone for this discussion.

Key terms: gender, landscape, place, belonging.

Sublime Futures: eco-art and the return of the real in Peter Dombrovskis, John Wolseley and Andy Goldsworthy

By Ian McLean

The paper examines the relationship between earlier nineteenth century aesthetic representations of nature through a romantic subjectivity and its tropes of the sublime and freedom, and contemporary ecological values. The focus of the discussion is the work of three very different artists: Peter Dombrovskis, John Wolseley and Andy Goldsworthy. While each emerged in the 1970s in three very different places with three very different aesthetic agendas, they shared two deeply held convictions: a highly developed ecological consciousness that sought to aesthetically subvert the anthropocentric values of Western civilisation, and a commitment to working far from metropolitan centres. The paper diagnoses in their work a desire for renewal and redemption on the edges of civilisation that has preoccupied modern art since the late eighteenth century. It argues that a wild nature was the locus for thinking about the great themes of Enlightenment: domination, freedom and subjectivity. The ecological turn might seem to turn against the anthropocentric conventions of Enlightenment&Mac226;s progeny, capitalism and modernity, but in fact it reinforces (through a repetition) the overall project. Wilderness always was and still is a site from which modernity imagines the origins of its discourses of freedom and redemption.

Key terms: redemption, Goldsworthy, Wolsley, Dombrovskis, sublime, subjectivity, nature.

Urban Exposures

By Panizza Allmark

Unlike the traditional notion of the sublime, which is a masculine aesthetic, my photographic work explores the uncanny, a feminist counter aesthetic, and the urban environment. I describe my work as a photographie feminine, writing the traces of the feminine body. Importantly I address the contradictions and dichotomies of the feminine that exist within the periphery of the city.

Key terms: uncanny, photography, sexuality, feminine, night.

Rocks in Their Heads: The “Landscape and You” Experience

By George Karpathakis

Humanity has had a long relationship with rocks including collecting them. This article argues that humans collect and use rocks for many for many purposes: utilitarian, economic, scientific, sacred, decorative and mnemonic. The collected rock acquires meaning different from the rock in situ. This meaning can be communal or personal, connected to events, real or mythic, or to place. The rock can act as a sign or tell a story. It can be seen as a metonym of the landscape. Or it can be viewed as a synecdoche, the part standing in for the whole, for a landscape or an experience. The meaning of the collected rock or the rock collection varies from person to person and can change over time.

Key terms: rocks, collections, stories, histories, landscapes, Australian culture, iconography, fossickers, souvenirs, clubs, pastimes.

China’s Mother River Scolds Her Young: Modernization and the National Landscape

By Jane Sayers

The search for modernity has been central to Chinese cultural debates in the twentieth century. One argument that has commonly been expressed is the fear that the price of modernity will be traditional values. Tradition is strongly linked to the countryside, and as a way of clearing a space for the modern in urban centres, this link has led to the rejection of the countryside has that which is holding the nation back in its quest. But recently nature has been breaking out of these representations and bringing the consequences of the degradation it has suffered back into the arena of urban attention. This is discussed through an examination of the countryside in two cultural texts, and then in light of the case of the deforestation along the Yellow River, which has contributed to erosion, desertification and other consequences that enter the urban centres.

Key terms: China, national identity, cultural politics, environmental protection, modernization, Yellow River.

issue 4 — Independent Articles 2002

Community radio, radicalism and the grassroots: Discussing the politics of contemporary Australian community

By Susan Forde, Michael Meadows and Kerrie Foxwell

In late 1999, researchers from Griffith University in Australia embarked on a two-year research project of the Australian community radio sector. That project, which is nearing completion, investigated the role of community radio; the profile of community radio personnel; the training contribution of the sector; use of new technologies, and the cultural contribution of the sector, among other things. In general, it was designed to provide a comprehensive snapshot of the Australian community radio industry as it stands today. During the project, some interesting data emerged which reveals much about the Australian sector. The data shows that, contrary to popular perceptions, the Australian community radio sector is relatively conservative in its outlook, possibly caused by a significant shift to the ‘right’ in the past 10 years which seem to have coincided with its move into regional areas, and its increasing commitment to commercial goals. Community radio is no longer the site of radical or grassroots political action that it was once perceived to be, although it is still strongly anchored in its ‘communities of interest’.

Key terms: Community Radio; Politics; Radicalism; Grassroots; Culture; Public Radio.

issue 3 — Cultural Memory

Rumble in the Jungle

By Steven Quinn

Drum’n’bass is a musical form that expresses the antagonisms of British identity in the 1990s and it also situates itself outside of the dominant terms of African-American expressions of black identity. It speaks of a more productive possibility in the traditional relationship between national and global polarities or public and private histories. Being at once an expression of the crucial significance of place in any characterisation of identity, it also recognises the influence of circumstances that exist outside of the narrow terms of national affiliation. Drum’n’bass represents a metonymic formulation of the long history of race and migration and its (often invisible) effects on the nature of British cultural identity in particular and popular music in general.

Key terms: Drum’n’Bass, British cultural identity, Black cultural identity, electronic dance music, rave, Harry Beck, London Underground Map.

Keeping it (Hyper)real

By Amanda Evans

This article investigates the (history) lessons revealed by THE FACE about the present. As such it concentrates on one area of deviation that exists within THE FACE – the yearly fashion issue. The seductive, and highly hegemonic, nature of fashion is no more obvious than in the pages of monthly style and genre journals. Within these pages, fashion literacy is assumed and naturalised as commonsensical. The visual communities that revolve around magazines like THE FACE further enhance this legitimising process. This framing requires a literacy of THE FACE discourse, one that melds the knowledge of fashion with the familiarity of lifestyle, consumption and pleasure. Fashion, then, is a language embedded with the signs and syntax of the everyday. Fashion is not a free-standing construct: it is socially defined within the sphere of a community ideology. The illustration of THE FACE community could concentrate on many facets of the magazine, but in this investigation it is these vogue registers that demand a specialised understanding of THE FACE and its mobilisation of a verbal and visual fashion language, or indeed a fashionable FACE language.

Key terms: magazines, fashion, hyperreal, imagined (virtual) communities, semiotics.

We're one short for the crossing: Abbey Road and popular memory

By Tara Brabazon

One of the most understated debates within contemporary cultural studies is popular memory. Requiring radical interdisciplinary work, and a diverse array of textual sites, it remains a challenge for the theorist. This piece takes a cultural text - the wall encircling Abbey Road studios in London - and explores how fans inscribe their memories and meanings on its surface.

Key terms: Beatles, popular memory, London, popular music, fandom, Abbey Road

Cinema on Cinema: Self-reflexive Memories in Recent Italian History Films

By Tiziana Ferrero-Regis

This essay focuses on a discourse of contestation about the present which has emerged in Italian cinema since the end of the 1980s. This discourse is narrated in cinematic images of past films inserted in fictional stories. Through cinema self-reflectivity, the past is depicted as more authentic and signifies the loss of innocence of the Italian society of the 1990s, buried under scandals of political corruption and deconstruction of its traditional party system.<

Films such as Cinema Paradiso, Splendor, The Icicle Thief and La vera storia di Antonio H., but also many other films produced in recent years, emphasise a common heritage in a period of individual and collective internal and external chaos.

A common term of reference in these films is the relationship between cinema and television. This relationship is portrayed in these films in a problematic way, as the pervasive presence of television in Italian everyday life is held as responsible for the crisis in the cinema industry. With its omnipresent images, re-runs, programme clones, anthologies and stock programmes, television seems to have taken over the function as archive of the country's historical memory.

The pivotal work of Maurice Halbwachs on collective memory is used here as a tool of analysis of the role of memory as an instrument of reconfiguration of the past for specific groups of the Italian audience. The argument that stems from this analysis is that the films produced in Italy in the last decade that focus on history and memory reconstruct identity in the group of the baby-boomer generation, ensuring thus continuity with the past.

Key terms: cinema and television self-reflexivity, history and collective memory, identity, Italian politics, Italian cinema, Italian television.

Eyes Wide Shut: Tom, Nicole, Stardom and Visual Memory

By Jeannette Delamoir

The star phenomenon is highly visual; among the many texts that conglomerate into what is experienced as a "star," visual artefacts have a privileged position. Visual memory, then, is an important but little considered factor in the construction of the star persona. In order to investigate the role played by visual memory in star personae, Australian women's magazine coverage of the Nicole Kidman/Tom Cruise breakup is examined. This exploration shows how magazines create interpretive contexts for images-contexts that can change, exposing the instability of the meanings of the images. The media's use of star images is frequently influenced by powerful and highly paid publicists, whose job it is to attempt to control the possible interpretations of the images, and therefore to shape and reshape visual memory.

Key terms: visual memory, star, spectacle, narrative, women's magazines, Kidman/Cruise.

The Postmodern Prometheus: Collective experience and the carnivalesque

By Leanne McRae

The resistive potential of the marginal collective has framed cultural studies interrogation of popular culture. It has often mobilised an ethic of play and inversion that sits comfortably with cultural studies politics. The capacity for official versions of history to mask these local and fragmented experiences has silenced the range of alternative identities that circulate through the fringes of culture. The X-Files episode The "Postmodern Prometheus" creates a visibility for unofficial and popular versions of the past. This paper tracks the metamorphosis of the carnival moment from official inversionary practice through the deviancy of American B-grade horror and science fiction films to its reanimation via a celebration of radical difference mobilised through the popular media. The X-Files' rewriting of Frankenstein dislodges social meanings from their original context and articulates a distinctly visual memory of a popular past to rewrite the collective experiences of the present.

Key terms: The X-Files, Carnivalesque, Popular Memory, Unofficial Discourses, Mediated Memories, Grotesque.

Why is this night different from all other nights?

By Felicity Newman

Memories are called up by many different methods. Jewish family life is so tightly wound up with mothers and chicken soup that these memories are best accessed via the kitchen. This fragment of culinary memoir attempts to convey the way in which certain foods conjure competing images of brown-eyed Jewish mothers and desolation in the desert. Enjoy already!

Key terms: collective memory, foodways, ritual, cultural superfood, Seder.

issue 2 — Fleeing The City

Sea Change: Re-Inventing Rural and Regional Australia

By Peter Murphy

The ABC’s popular SeaChange series has re-popularised the idyll of getting away from big city pressures to high amenity rural and small town settings on the Australian coastline and in select inland localities usually within striking distance of the big cities. This paper addresses: the changing relationships between city and hinterland that enable, or drive, such choices; the reasons why people choose to move; the different types of places in which they settle; and the implications for these places, the settlers and existing residents. Movements from city to country have been going on for a long time, 30 years in their contemporary manifestations in Australia and in other western industrialised nations. Whilst the factors involved are constant, there are significant recent shifts to the balance of forces that make the most recent period, and the scenario for the future, distinctive and worthy of continued attention by researchers and policy makers. Drawing on a long-term research engagement with the subject, the paper is based on a recent public lecture given by the author at the State Library of New South Wales.

A Place At the Coast: Internal Migration and the Shift to the Coastal-countryside

By Johanna Kijas

Thirty years ago a new trend in Australia's internal migration turned attention to the warm coastal-countryside. And yet it is only recently that much research attention has been focused on this coastal shift. This article reviews the material on internal migration in Australia, with a focus on New South Wale's mid-north coast which has experienced burgeoning new-settler populations since the 1970s. It suggests there is much to be done in ethnographic research on this population shift.

Where Green Turns to Gold: Strip Cultivation and the Gold Coast Hinterland

By Grahame Griffin

The social and cultural relationships between a rapidly expanding coastal tourist city (the Gold Coast) and its hinterland are explored through the analysis of local media representations.

Mapping the Rainbow Region: Fields of belonging and Sites of Confluence

By Baden Offord

This essay is about feelings of belonging considered in a self-reflexive journey through two landscapes - one theoretical, one physical/metaphysical. It argues that through the quilting of memories, critical reflections, anecdote, fictional readings, interviews and thick description, belonging becomes articulated through a spatial prism and imbrication of cultural fields and flows. The essay locates this theorisation of belonging in an exercise of mapping place and space in the rainbow region of northern New South Wales. Focusing on two specific coordinates that have subjective resonance for the author, Caddies Cafe and the Byron Lighthouse Walk, the essay explores what happened when he fled from the city.

Fleeing the City Within: a Mental Health Perspective

By Diana Sweeney & David A Pollard

This paper examines the mentally ill as a subculture residing within the alternative cultural landscape of Byron Bay. The positioning of the mentally ill as a subculture is an intentional feature of the investigation which aims to view the mentally ill as culturally unique. Drawing on the work of Baldwin, Longhurst, McCracken, Ogborn and Smith (1998), and focussing specifically on their treatment of subcultures, the paper will explore the relationships which exist between the mentally ill and mainstream society.

Memories and idylls: Urban Reflections on Lost Places and Inner Landscapes

By Jane Mulcock and Yann Toussaint

This paper considers two ways in which urban-based Australians (re)create personal connections with rural and ‘natural’ landscapes: Mulcock’s material on the alternative health and spirituality movement in Australia, and Toussaint’s research with urban conservationists involved in restorative tree-planting projects in rural Western Australia provide the context for this exploration . Through the adoption of everyday rituals, city-based supporters of the Landcare movement and participants in the alternative health and spirituality movement attempt to preserve sacred spaces in their daily lives. These spaces symbolise a metaphorical and ongoing flight from the city, a desire for emotional, rather than physical, distance from urban lifestyles. We argue that these contemporary Australian engagements with ‘nature’ and the ‘rural’ perpetuate an Arcadian vision, a longing to recover a personal, national, and mythic Golden Age, interwoven with a desire for the ‘lost places’, remembered and imagined, that lie beyond the city ‘walls’.

Rural Lines of Flight: Telecommunications and Post-Metro Dreaming

By Gerard Goggin

Information and communications technologies hold a prominent place in the cultural imagination of many people living outside the Australian metropolis, especially recent émigrés. A vision of a wired pastoral conjures up the possibilities of city work, connections and pleasures accompanying the flight to the country. Such aspirations have given a twist to one of the great topos of Australian post-invasion communications history, communications ameliorating the perceived isolation in the bush. This article examines important changes to rural telecommunications in the 1990s coinciding with post-metro dreaming and digital convergence, namely the rise of local telecommunications. Neo-Foucauldian accounts of citizenship hold some promise for explaining the criss-cross of tangled lines of flight in regional communications in the twenty-first century: emergent subjectivities, utopian digital modes of becoming, new politics of infrastructure, reconfigured relationships among state, market and citizen.

Migration, Music and Social Relations on the NSW Far North Coast

By Chris Gibson

This article explores urban-rural migration on the NSW Far North Coast (the ‘Northern Rivers’ region) and the emergence of popular music as a niche cultural industry. The various images of the NSW Far North Coast as a ‘lifestyle’ region, ‘alternative’ region and coastal retreat have attracted a diverse mix of ex-urban professionals, unemployed persons, youth subcultures and retirees, yet despite population growth, the region continues to suffer unemployment rates among the highest in Australia. Against this backdrop, popular music has emerged as a niche industry with linkages to cultural production in Sydney, Melbourne and overseas, and also an area of creative expression that interacts with, and mediates local social relations.

Music Making in the Village of Nimbin

By Michael Hannan

The focus of this paper is on the function and value of music in a small community, the village of Nimbin in the North Eastern corner of New South Wales, Australia. The paper provides a brief historical and social background of the village as well as some historical information about musical life since the legendary Aquarius Festival (1973). Emphasis is placed on current musical practices and the spatial politics of musical production in the village. The use of music for political protest, community celebration and fund-raising for community projects is discussed. In addition some treatment of professional and semi-professional music making is provided within the context of the national music industry. Music is shown to have a vital and pervasive role in the life and identity of this community.

Dropping in, Not out: the Evolution of the Alternative Press in Byron Shire 1970-2001

By Fiona Martin & Rhonda Ellis

This paper examines the evolution of alternative print publications in the Byron Shire of coastal Northern NSW, a region that since the 1970s has attracted a steady stream of 'alternative seekers' from urban centres. We discuss the reasons why most alternative newspapers and magazines in the area flowered and died quickly, while one, the Brunswick Valley Echo, recently celebrated its 15th anniversary as the Byron Shire Echo and has become the dominant weekly in the Shire. In comparing The Echo to its current corporate competitor, The Byron Shire News, we identify The Echo as a hybrid commercial/community media identity which contributes to an alternative public sphere, and remains physically and symbolically tied to its counter-culture roots.

issue 1 — Queensland Regional Imaginary

Birch Carroll and Coyle and the Regional Picture Palace: A case study

By Denis Cryle, Betty Cosgrove & Ray Boyle

The article outlines the regional origins of Birch, Carroll and Coyle in Queensland with special reference to Rockhampton and the Wintergarden theatre. The emergence of a distinctive regional theatre designed to attract new audiences for Hollywood product, along with live entertainment capacity, were major factors in sustaining the dominance of BCC in regional Queensland for almost half a century.

Identity Through Sound and Image: This is Australia?

By Jim Douglas

Beginning with the example of GANGgajang's song The Sounds of Then, this discussion explores whether or not there is such a thing as an Australian sound in popular or rock music. Of particular concern are the actions of transnational corporations, the Internet and governments in the creation or subversion of such a notion. Sometimes national or transnational groups appropriate regional or local identities in order to 'infiltrate'a society. Such groups are often concerned with misappropriation of 'the local' in order to acquire a particular hegemonic position. Rather than resisting the forces of global capital, so-called 'local' sites may indigenise aspects of Imperialist cultures. However, ignoring the reality of contemporary global organisations is folly. Not only that, but 'local'cultural forms will always survive so long as there are those that wish to have a 'voice'of their own. And, in the case of rock music, is the national point of origin really all that much of an issue?

Capturing the Heart of the Region: How Regional Media Define a Community

By Jacqui Ewart

This paper examines the role regional media play in constructiing a region’s publics. It examines how journalists at one regional newspaper conceptualise the public and investigates how these concepts are played out through a series of articles from the same newspaper.

Learning to be a Nurse: The Culture of Training in a Regional Queensland Hospital, 1930–1950

By Wendy Madsen

Young women wishing to train as a nurse during the early part of this century, entered into a hospital environment which taught them not only the skills of nursing, but also skilled them in how to be a nurse. Along with learning how to do a dressing, they learnt obedience,and while learning how to clean the pan room, they learnt about hierarchy and the traditions of nursing. Trainees were required to live and work within the confines of the hospital grounds,and as such, developed a distinct culture that was a compilation of work, moral and traditional elements.

This paper will use a combination of oral and documentary sources to examine the development of the nursing culture and the transformation of nursing students within the ward environment of the Rockhampton Hospital between 1930 and 1950. Focusing on a small regional hospital allows one to gain a greater understanding of the nursing culture, and to investigate this culture to a greater depth as it existed in one location. In particular,aspects of reinforcing the nursing culture will be examined, that is the communication channels that had to be followed, delegation of duties and the nursing hierarchy, and the socialisation of trainees by other trainees as part of the informal educational processes.

Imagining Colonial Space in Regional Queensland: Film and Governance

By Warwick Mules

A series of films commissioned by the Queensland government in 1898 were made, showing a variety of scenes of metropolitan Brisbane and rural regions of Queensland. This paper examines some of these films in terms of the way they constitute a ‘colonial imaginary ’ involving the positioning of the spectator in time and space. By drawing on Metz’s ideas of the cinema apparatus, as well as Foucault’s arguments concerning the surveillance of space, the paper shows how these films can be read in terms of an imagined audience based on immigration policies at the time. Overall, the paper argues that films from previous eras should not be read simply as objective representations of a social context, but in terms of an imaginary constitution which is virtually located within the real, and involving a range of rhetorical and aesthetic practices and modes of presentation.

The Transformative Effects of CDs on the Australian Folk Festival Scene

By Karl Neuenfeldt

This article explores the transformative effects of the compact disk (CD) on the Australian folk festival scene using the 1998 Australian National Folk Festival as a case study. Edited interviews and analysis highlight how CDs circulate along with musicians and music genres in a global cultural economy and musical technoculture. The CD is characterised as a marketing and musical product; a kind of cultural and symbolic capital; and, a pivotal part of the musicality, sociality,and commerciality of the folk festival scene, while it simultaneously helps transform musical and performative genres.