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California State University, Dominguez Hills
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Created: November 5, 2002
Latest Update: November 25, 2002
jeannecurran@habermas.org
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Site Copyright: Jeanne Curran and Susan R. Takata and Individual Authors, November 2002.
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reflexivity REFLEXIVITY, GENDER AND THE CULTURAL FIELD The extensive debates regarding whether or not contemporary life may be characterized as involving increasing reflexivity are littered with contestations, including the issue of whether or not reflexivity should be conceived as primarily social or cultural, debates over the limits or reflexivity, and debates concerning the extent to which reflexivity is linked to various forms of detraditionalization. This paper is concerned with these debates in as much as they relate to issues of gender. In particular it focuses on the widespread argument and assumption that increasing reflexivity (or as it is sometimes termed 'the freeing of agents from social structure') is undoing the norms and rules of gender. I shall argue in this paper however that this assumption is to forego an analysis of the 'freeing of agents from structure' and reduces the cultural field to one of free play and experimentation. In short this paper points to the ways in which theories of reflexivity (particularly certain sociological theories) fail to address the significance of the cultural field for the making of difference, categorization and division. Paul Alberts (University of Western Sydney) CULTURE, CONNECTIVITY AND THEORY'S DISCONNECTION An important part of understanding culture centres on the transmission or reinscription of its characteristics between subjects and across time and space. This implies forms of connection and forms of transmission integral to the very definition and differentiation of cultural forms. It has become common to make communicability a crucial dimension of analysing culture; for instance, Lyotard's famous concern that the capacities to digitise, store and network cultural material will form thresholds for determining evaluation of knowledges. If communicability has thus, for example, through the power of technological change, become increasingly important as criteria for evaluating culture, then what is implied for connectivity? As a tradition from Innis and McLuhan (and elsewhere) argued, communicability is tied to general structures of 'human association' - ethical and political formations that function through empowering and legitimating forms of connection. If connectivity must then be considered ethical and political, but ethics and politics are as much about disconnection - conflict, war, difference, boundaries, exclusion, disengagement etc - then the theoretical task of reflecting or writing this itself implies a negotiation of connection and disconnection: the very tradition of 'reflection' implies a certain strategic dis/connectivity. This paper attempts to delineate how theory of contemporary communication and culture is itself becoming rewritten and reinscribed by forces of dis/connectivity, become other-than its self-image. Nicole Anae ICONIC IDENTITIES: THEORISING EVIL TO RE-APPREHEND THEORY AS THE ABSENCE OF POST MODERNITY. Nietzsche says: it is a matter of creating a memory for man; and man, who has constituted by means of an active faculty for forgetting (oubli), by means of a repression of biological memory, must create, an other memory, one that is collective, a memory of words (paroles) and no longer a memory of things, a memory of signs and no longer effects. Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari (1983) Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia 145 Evil is memory. Evil is forgetting. Evil is reading practice. Evil is some 'other'-thing, largely identifiable through a process of negation in which one must recognise the oppositional identities in order to recognise the self determining ones. It is a reading practice by which we know what we are by what we are not. It is as much a process of self determinisation as it is a process of memory. If we are asking "What's left of theory?", with the question itself voicing a kind of crisis of critical identity in which one must remember, then theory too becomes a question of adversarial proportions; proportions which attempt to re-locate, or reveal, a kind of subjectivity through an oppositional paradigm. Theory, it seems, has become concealed within a critical nihility of contradiction in that, although theory as a "thing" appears to function as a totalised concept in its own right, with singularity conveniently attempting to confine "theory" as a "thing", one can ultimately only read theory through multiplicity itself. Epistemologically speaking, if we are to determine what remains of this thing called theory in opposition to ourselves, we must paradoxically reveal an historical metaphor (the memory of what theory was in relation to me) within an ahistorical existential moment ("an other" memory of what theory might now be in relation to me). It is here, within this ontological moment of crisis, that theory as an absence of post modernity is at its most profound. Within this nihility of contradiction, the drive to re-apprehend theory from forgetting as a kind of "memory of words" and "a memory of signs", is apparent in the desire to know. It is an enterprise of re-apprehension where re-apprehension must deploy new ways of remembering and new ways of reading the singular within a process of negation which demands multiplicity. In the confusion of the desire the know, re-apprehending theory becomes a matter of memory. If, in the Deleuzian preoccupation with effect, theory has become devoid of "sign", it is little wonder then that revealing theory is now a matter of the re-apprehension of the sign itself. Such re-apprehension, or re-memorising, must deploy new ways of reading, precisely because when some-thing is understood as a singularity of effects, but read through a multiplicity of things, such a thing is an absence. It is reduced to a singular thing which may or may not be there. Hence the very question itself; "What's left of Theory?" Kath Albury (UNSW) THEORISING NON-COMPULSORY HETEROSEXUALITY Does heterosexuality equal heteronormativity? Can heterosexuality be re-made without being completely undone? If so, can small shifts and changes in contemporary heterosexual practices and identities be seen as evidence of this re-making? As Carol Smart puts it, many feminists have tended to theorise heterosexuality '... as if there were really only two available positions; ... to gloat over the mistakes of heterosexual women [or] ... to apologise for being heterosexual.' (1996 p168) With the rise of 'amateur' sex magazines, contact lists, support networks and websites, the private inner sanctum of everyday heterosexual normativity (the suburban bedroom) has increasingly been made public; and the increasing visibility of alternative heterosexual sex and relationship styles demand different, queerer theories of straight sex. The practices revealed on these sites (and in women's magazines and television programs such as Sex and the City) are not always explicitly politicised... nor are they adequately described in terms of 'transgression', 'liberation' or 'empowerment'. However, traditional theories of a sadistic male gaze (and deluded female complicity) are also clearly well short of the mark. I therefore engage with the work of Michel Foucault and William Connolly to explore the challenges and pleasures presented by the possibility of theorising 'de-sanctified', non-compulsory heterosexualities. Ruth Barcan (University of Western Sydney) In 1996, as part of an application for government funding for a project aimed at finding new ways of teaching "theory," I found myself writing: "'Theory' is vexed pedagogical terrain in the increasingly transdisciplinary Humanities." If "theory" was a curricular and pedagogical problem then, how much more so might it be in an age in which one is starting to hear the phrase "post-theory" echo around the corridors? Have we hit a post-theoretical moment, and if so, what might that mean for teaching practice in the Humanities? This paper is an exploration of some of the problems (practical, intellectual and political) of teaching theory to undergraduates. A mini-taxonomy of modes of "doing theory" forms the basis around which questions are raised about the politics of why and how we might teach theory. Each of these different modes of teaching theory implies and produces a potential politics, as well as different teaching methods, modes of engagement, and student/teacher relations. Student resistance and theoretical plurality are discussed as both tropes and strategies. Jon Beasley-Murray (University of Manchester) THE LIMITS OF THEORY: TOWARDS A MULTITUDINOUS INTELLECTUAL PRACTICE The problem with theory is that it has been too often taken to provide solutions to practical problems. Or, alternatively, it has been attacked for not providing such solutions, and practice has been proposed as the solution to problems that arise within theory. This paper follows Gilles Deleuze's reading of Spinoza's parallelism to suggest that both this (theoreticist) celebration and this (populist) criticism of theory are misplaced. In fact, theory can only provide solutions to theoretical problems--while problems that arise within practice require practical solutions. Yet the problems that arise within theory parallel those that arise within practice. If the foremost practical political question today is that of how to organize the bodies and collectivities that constitute the multitude, then the foremost theoretical question may be that of how to organize the concepts that constitute theory to produce a multitudinous intellectual practice. This paper aims to outline the contours of such a multitudinous organization of theory. Amy Berk and Andy Cox THE ART OF EVERYDAY LIFE. CONSIDERING THEORY AS THE APPLICATION OF PHILOSOPHY TO EVERYDAY LIFE. In the 20th century various groups have expounded theories concerning the dissolving of art into life, including: Dada (Marcel Duchamp), Stiuationists (Guy Debord), Art and Life (Alan Kaprow), Constuctivists (Aleksandr Rodchenko, Varvara Stepanova), Fluxus (George Macunias, Yoko Ono), Feminist Art (Mary Kelley, Eleanor Antin) Arte Povera (Marisa Merz, Germano Celant), and Poetic Terrorism (Hakim Bey). Their aim , as broadly stated by Alan Kaprow is to "weave meaning-making activity into any or all parts of life." Debord wanted to "destroy art" making the distinction between art and life irrelevant thereby creating a new society. The seeds of these thinkers' philosophies can be found in earlier thinkers such as Hegel, Emerson, and Mary Shelley. We are interested in theories that dissolve art into everyday life, revealing elements of life that would otherwise remain hidden. Such elements range from day to day interactions, through media imagery and analysis, educational practices, technology, and ultimately the underlying ideology of society: capitalism. For Cox, as for Debord, the melding of art and life is a (r)evolutionary practice that can, using such strategies as detournement, peel back the layers of the Spectacle, reveal its contradictions and put us on a path to a better, more egalitarian society: utopian perhaps (and Jappe has called the Situationists the last utopian socialists), but "if you don't have a dream, how you gonna have a dream come true?" Berk believes that through exploding what lies behind societal strategies of power, presentation, and content, economic, gendered and cultural boundaries can be broken and "free" thinking can begin. Are artists breaking down the boundaries between theory and practice? Does theory melt into practice as art and life merge? Or, does art just dissolve into advertising? In this paper, we place our artwork, in the context of theories of art and life. Using examples from our work (on the streets, in the gallery, in print, and on the internet) and that of others, we present the idea that wider dissolution of art into life (political practice, education, popular culture) is necessary before authentic change towards a more humane society is possible. Amy Berk is an artist, writer, and educator. Andy Cox is an artist, engineer, and activist. They live in San Francisco and are currently in residence at New Pacific Studio, Masterton, New Zealand. Theory has been absorbed into our art, and our art has been dissolved into our lives. Ron Blaber, (Curtin University) ASPIRATIONAL CLASSES, BIG BROTHER AND POLITICAL ADJOURNMENT. Tom Morton in the Sydney Morning Herald of 16th June 2001 suggests we forget Big Brother and Moulin Rouge and rather concern ourselves with the "sexiest of social groups"- aspirational classes. Just who constitute the aspirational classes is up for grabs and that is the point for political pollsters. Morton amongst others argue that the "aspirationals are the lower middle class rebranded" and are afforded the political importance of determining electoral outcomes in western democracies. Morton notes that New Labour in Britain and the George W Bush Republican campaigns courted the aspirational class. In Australia, Mark Latham has been keen to argue the significance the aspirational classes to future Labor success. However, the term aspirational class is highly problematic. First what does a member of the class aspire to; second, if one aspires to something different, where does that put you politically; third, what if one does not have the time to aspire anyway. This paper, rather than forgetting Big Brother, addresses the above in terms of the programs "re-discovery" of "nostalgic identification" and suggests that a political desire for aspirational classes misreads the significance of other social identifications that could challenge party political engagement with the social. Roland Boer ADORNO ON KIERKEGAARD In his first philosophical monograph, on Kierkegaard, Adorno engages in a sustained fashion with theology. Although the book also deals with ontology and aesthetics, my focus is on the way he approaches theology, especially given that he was an atheist. There are three major arguments Adorno makes against Kierkegaard: that his retreat into objectless inwardness cannot avoid history; that Kierkegaard's theology slips into the myth it perpetually represses; and that the paradoxes of theology eventually break up the possibility of any system based on theological categories. Throughout these arguments, I will trace Adorno's simultaneous fascination with and suspicion of theology. On the one hand, an immanent dialectical method is able to make the most of theology (as he advised Benjamin), and yet theology is profoundly unable to provide any coherence for philosophy. Adorno is caught between these two positions, and I will explore whether he is able to resolve the tension. Geoff Boucher (University of Melbourne) POSTMARXISM'S RETURN TO HEGEL: AN ALTHUSSERIAN REPLY The postmarxist discourse theories of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Slavoj Zizek and Judith Butler represent one of the most ambitious and challenging efforts to reconstruct the project of the Left today, as the project of a radical and plural democracy. Instead of lamenting the decline of class politics and the accumulating irrelevance of the Left, Laclau and Mouffe sought to rearticulate the conceptual framework within which radical Left politics could be imagined as a potential alternative to both social democracy and the neo-liberal conservative parties. The publication last year of the joint work by Laclau, Zizek and Butler, Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left (2000), with its declaration of a common trajectory and allegiance to the project of radical democracy, marks an important step in the consolidation of this tendency. Debates around the meaning of history when interpreted not as a necessary process but as a sequence of contingencies, questions of political universality and ethical solidarity, and disputes about the social content of radical democracy have now moved onto the contemporary theoretical agenda. When Laclau and Mouffe launched the manifesto of postmarxism, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (1985), they announced that they had broken with the vision of a rational history and transparent society characteristic of both Hegel and 'the inverted Hegelianism of Marx'. They sought to replace this 'rational and intelligible structure' governed by logical or historical necessity, with a contingent sequence of 'historical blocs' governed by the politics of hegemonic articulation. Yet right from the start, some commentators insisted that Laclau and Mouffe had produced a 'Hegelianism with a deconstructive twist'. To the alarm of Laclau in particular, political allies Butler and Zizek have persisted in their belief that the theory of hegemony is a restatement of the Hegelian notion of the concrete universal. There can be no doubt that Laclau and Mouffe intend to reject both speculative dialectics and the philosophy of praxis. The theory of discourse produced in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy is incoherent, however, and relies for its intelligibility on a latent speculative totality. The root of this speculative identity of being and thinking is their rejection of the distinction between practice and discourse on the grounds that this is merely a 'differentiation within the social production of meaning'. As a result, the radical democratic programme for an agonic democracy rooted in a normative framework reverts to the idealist strategy of cultural hegemony within a vision of mutual recognition. Laclau and Mouffe persistently misrecognise the radicalism of Althusser's rethinking of Marxism and consequently underestimate the ability of structural Marxism to enter the terrain defined by contemporary politics and philosophy. The politics of democratic socialism and the theory of structural Marxism remain an alternative to the semi-expressive totality of postmarxist discourse theory and the return to 'ethical life' suggested by radical democracy. Anita Brady (University of Otago) "MEET YOUR BEST CUSTOMER": GAY.COM AND GLOBALISED QUEERNESS This paper will explore subcultural engagement with, and intervention in, globalised commodity culture. It will suggest that globalised technologies can be figured as offering the possibility of heterogeneity to subcultural difference otherwise subsumed by paradigms of national identity. The internet, as one of the prime sites where globalisation is made manifest, appears to offer just such a possibility. Closer examination of the commodity culture that drives this globalised technology, however, reveals a particular articulation of identity that suggests the heterogeneity on offer may not be as readily available as appearances suggest. With this possibility in mind, this paper will examine the internet site of Gay.com. My interest in this site in particular rests on its organisation around a marginalised form of difference. As such it provides an example of how the globalised space of the internet may appear to offer the possibility of a liberatory heterogeneity to lesbians and gay men. However Gay.com's location in, and its playing out of, commodity culture suggests an investment in a homogenised form of gay identity. The site's utilisation of the discourse of the "pink dollar" in its marketing literature intersects with its registration policies and its regulations around chatroom participation to articulate particular, and fixed, possibilities of identification. These articulations appear to be directly at odds with the possibilities offered by the theoretical notion of "queer". This paper asks: can Gay.com's "gay identity" contain the queer possibilities of internet technology? Does the community-as-niche-market logic of the site pre-empt queer interventions into its deployment of the currency of identity? Or is there something within this particular technology, and within the site of Gay.com, that may enable a political moment of queer excess? Angi Buettner (University of Queensland) THEORY'S DEAD BODIES - THEORY, VISUAL REPRESENTATIONS, AND THE HOLOCAUST According to the Greek notion of theoria, which implies the visual distantiation of the look, we practice theory whenever we observe something. In our times, our look is mainly directed at images of leftovers. Today's visual culture is dominated by images of piles of corpses, wreckage, and rubble left in the aftermath of catastrophic events as genocide, terrorism, war or natural disasters. What kind of theory do we practice when we look at pictures of aftermath? Images today are perhaps the most dominant form of coded information. Therefore, we need to develop skills of how to look at them, particularly when we gaze at 'catastrophe', stare at the remains of extreme occurrences. In the case of representations of bodies and corpses we are challenged with a fundamental theoretical question: how to differentiate between representations and their objects? What is left of theory when what remains of historical events are images of corpses or rubble? Such images do not go away. The enormous presence of Holocaust imagery in cultural productions is but one clear example. Representations of the Jewish Holocaust both abound and are transferred onto other contemporary events, such as for example the genocide in Rwanda, or, in different contexts, the Aids epidemic. This process of translation and troping results from the attempt to cope with catastrophe, to register and translate the experience of such events into some form of theoretical or visual language. Given the anti-ocularcentric mood of some attacks on theory and given that theory can be understood as a practice of linkage, of establishing and grouping comparative phenomena (Haraway), what does the practice of visual Holocaust conscriptions tell us about how theory operates, how images perform and how we work with images? Kellie Burns (University of Otago) QUEER THEORY, COMMODITY LOGIC, AND THE SYDNEY GAY GAMES This paper considers the role of queer theory in relation to popular cultural events such as the 2002 Sydney Gay Games. According to its promotional materials, the Gay Games "challenge[s], stimulate[s] and extend[s] boundaries" which gestures towards the possibility of a transgressive political practise. Through an examination of the promotional culture surrounding the Gay Games, I will examine the tenuous nature of the term 'queer' in relation to this international sporting event. On the one hand, these promotional materials (i.e. website, pamphlets, sponsorship agreements) purport to challenge heteronormative identity categories, however, this event participates in the commodity logic of global culture. This paper will consider the problems and potentials of queer theory as a political practise in relation to this gay cultural event. Alex Carpenter (Monash University) Alice Rae Bignall (Adelaide University) RETURN TO GROUND: SEEKING MEANING BEYOND THE REFERENTIAL To Marshall McLuhan, all artefacts (words, signs, objects) are 'figures' which can only have meaning in the context of their 'ground'. Characteristic of postmodernism is the 'split' of figure from ground, producing (and thereafter re-producing) ground-less figures or 'simulacra'. Art in the postmodern world (where most meaning has lost its ground) is a pastiche of referentiality. However, a counter-movement to postmodernism can be read in the work of artists and activists who, rejecting all signification, seek a 'return to ground'. Using examples from music and theatre practices, we investigate concepts of 'ground' from mathematical-realist and phenomenological perspectives respectively. Crucially, our question is: is there a 'ground' to which we can return, and should we be attempting to do so? Chadwick A.R. (Memorial University of Newfoundland) LACAN: THEORY AND PRACTICE Lacan's seminars, in particular XX to XXV, show a teacher who is focused on performing for his students the thought he is conveying. Theory is not separate from practice, nor is theory presented as a savoir which can be learned as a model to be later filled out in practice. Lacan's audience becomes simultaneously student, analyst and analysand, and his teaching practices a savoir-faire. In this paper I intend examining the relations of theory and practice in Seminar XXII "R.S.I" as a contribution to the discussion of theory's place in contemporary debates, in particular the pejorative sense of "theory" used by right-wing conservatives to segregate critical thinking from laissez-faire practices. Alaine Chanter (University of Canberra) THE HERE AND NOW-EXPERIENCE AS RESISTANCE From an onto-political perspective, we have come to doubt our experience. Positivism, many strands of Marxism, post-structuralism and even aspects of postmodernism have instructed us to be experientially suspicious, and rightly so. Moreover, attempts within feminism to re-establish the notion of experience-in this case women's experience-as a valid basis for political action were always fraught and have lapsed into disrepute, even within feminism itself. But in so delegitimising such a notion of experience, have we thrown the baby out with the bathwater? Does experience count for nought? Is it, as theory would have it, merely a distortion of reality, an appearance that belies an essence, an effect of discourse, or an inchoate sensation that is essentially meaningless? Theory may suggest this, but life does otherwise. Whatever the merits, it seems almost a compulsion of the human condition that we live life as, and through, experience. Maybe the issue is not so much a need to push beyond experience as it is to reassert its value in political praxis. This paper argues the case for such a reassertion. Its particular focus is on experience in the here and now-what in other instances might be called the local-and how it can be understood and valorised as a counterforce to the relative impersonal globalising forces in the world economy. My contention is that the pervasiveness of the notion of 'globalisation' results in an underestimation of the extent to which experience is local and might therefore constitute an ontological basis for resistance to globalisation. Ian Collinson (University of New South Wales) 'WHO SAYS IT MEANS THAT?': THE LOGIC OF PRACTICE & THE PRACTICE OF THEORY The study of popular cultural practices and texts has long been caught between the poles of condemnation and celebration. The intellectual Left has vacillated-now praising, now condemning-the cultural world in which most of us, and that includes academics-actually live. Those who have celebrated popular culture have deployed an array of sophisticated theoretical tools in order to highlight the cultural creativity of 'ordinary' people. But in so doing, as Simon During argues, the 'theorist is still telling the "popular audience" how their pleasure works in terms which owe much more to the history of theory than they do to what people actually say or think'. In this sense, academic theories of 'the popular' have had little to do with how people actually live their lives, and everything to do with the culture of the academy. There is nothing 'Left' about theories that continue to allow researchers to 'read' the actualities of other people's lives from texts (Smith). If theory is to fuel a progressive left cultural and social agenda, rather than simply operating as another form of intellectual capital, it needs to be linked to the experiences of those for whom it claims to speak. As Paul Willis has recently argued-theoretical formulations 'should not be self-referenced imaginings but grounded imaginings', grounded in the messy and capricious world that we inhabit. In a more grounded form, theory has a productive future, otherwise it is likely to reinscribe the intellectual certainties of liberal humanist neo-conservatism. Bob Cotgrove (University of Tasmania) FROM THE STRAWBS TO BOB THE BUILDER: PARADIGM SHIFTS IN INDUSTRIAL RELATIONS Several commentators have argued that the world is currently witnessing a major paradigm shift in civilization comparable to that which ushered in the industrial era some 200 years ago. This paper summarises the salient features, across a broad range of environmental, economic and social characteristics, of the transition from a declining industrial age to an emerging post-industrial era. Symptomatic of this paradigm shift is the transition in industrial relations from the class-based confrontation of The Strawbs' 1973 hit "You Don't Get Me I'm Part Of The Union" to the contemporary co-operative approach of Bob The Builder and his gang: "Working together they get the job done." Sean Cubitt (University of Waikato) ANALYTIC OF THE DIMENSIONLESS: TOWARDS A PROLEGOMENA FOR ANY FUTURE MATERIALISM Marx once observed that the concrete is always the result of a collision of abstractions. A hundred and fifty years later, our concrete world is accused of immateriality. For some its characteristic form is the sublime, unnameable and incommunicable object of awed contemplation, ahistorical and informe. At such junctures, theory becomes the apologist for the end of communication. And yet, clearly, we are still communicative creatures. For information theory as for semiotics, the necessary condition of communication is difference, and it is this difference which appears to have diminished to the point of evaporation. I want to enquire as to whether this real or virtual vanishing act concerns the loss of dimensionality. Far from witnessing the triumph of space over time, media productions of the last twenty years have evidenced the simultaneous loss of geography and history and their recreation as dimensionlessly 'pure' experience or event. The work of theory abandoned (or depoliticised) in loci of high cultural capital is now advanced in the ordinary processes of popular culture where, however, it obeys the materialist injunction to change the world. Oddly, the revolutionary task of the moment is to understand the world and the trajectories along which its processes are occurring. This presentation will draw on media and globalisation theory to suggest that 'analysis', as understood in revolutionary politics, is the key task of contemporary philosophy. Aaron Darrell (Macquarie University) RECONSIDERING STRUCTURALISM: DISCURSIVELY MEDIATED EMBODIED EXPERIENCE AND THE LIMITS OF SEMIOSIS Is the obituary for structuralism premature and/or a political event? Structuralism is widely considered to be passé with unlimited semiosis being the unspoken catchcry underlying recent interventions into theory. But is the obituary for structuralism premature and in fact the result of structural processes that construct the perspectives of those who declare its passing? This question is approached through an examination of what happens to the limits of semiosis when embodied experience is enmeshed in a repetitive and systematic series of spatially mediated routines. As a result of this analysis, the question is posed, can certain assumptions about the nature of meaning that are fundamental to the poststructuralist model be seriously questioned? Are current directions in post-structural theory the result of structuralist impositions upon everyday life, in particular, are these the result of a specific socio-cultural discursive positioning that is unique to the spatio-embodied experience of academics and the meanings that they construct as a result of these? Wendy Davis (Central Queensland University) PERFORMATIVE VISUALITY: GHOSTS, AFTERIMAGES AND TELEVISION In this paper post-structuralist theory (in particular Deleuze and Guattari, Judith Butler and Foucault) will be employed in order to rethink the contemporary cultural force of the television image. Beginning with a scene from the Australian television series Always Greener television will be mapped into a genealogical network of performative visuality which has points of resonance with a number of 19th and 20th century modes of visuality. This engagement between theory and television will be seen as a vital for producing an understanding of television's visual affective force and its position contemporary cultural commodity. Eduardo de la Fuente (University of Tasmania) WHY ARE PEOPLE TALKING ABOUT MODERNISM AGAIN? RECENT ARCHITECTURE AND CULTURAL THEORY According to the popular press, modernism is 'in style' again. Recent buildings such as the Altair apartments in Kings Cross, the Republic Tower in Melbourne, and the popularity of new designs by Harry Seidler, could be taken to suggest that modernism has reacquired a certain cultural authority. Indeed, advertisements for the apartments mentioned often depict the 'lifestyle' these buildings offer as one that combines cosmopolitanism and urbanity with 'retro-chic'. However, modernism's recent popularity has a history. Architectural critics, such as Charles Jencks, have been claiming for some time that from the late-1970s onwards there was a discernible reaction to 'postmodernism' in the work of architects such as Meier, Eisenman, Tschumi, Libeskind, Gehry, Piano, Rogers and Fosters. According to Jencks, this 'second wave' of modernism was without the ideological rhetoric, sense of historical inevitability, and 'functionalist' outlook, that had characterised early- and mid-twentieth century modernist architecture. In short, the 'new modernism' was an architectural discourse that saw modernism in primarily 'philosophical' (for e.g., the 'deconstructionist' assault on logocentrism) and 'stylistic' terms (for e.g., the use of minimalist colours, textures and surfaces). This paper addresses what these trends in recent architecture signal to cultural theory. It asks: does the resurgence of modernism make it more difficult to map the architectural field and to translate developments in this field to the domain of cultural theory? James Donald (Curtin University) ACADEMIC FREEDOM, MEDIA FREEDOM AND THE RESPONSIBILITIES OF THEORY To what are we responding when we theorise? I want to consider whether the practice of theory embodies what the principles (and privileges) of academic autonomy and academic freedom demand from us as scholars. This will require some ground-clearing work, and I therefore look at the distinction between academic autonomy and academic freedom (if there is one), as well as the distinction between those concepts and the related concepts of freedom of speech and media freedom. Stephanie Donald (University of Melbourne) NATIONS ONLINE: VIRTUAL TOURISM AND POLITICAL TRANSITION Michael Billig characterises the maintenance of ideologically stable national systems as 'banal'. His description is mooted primarily to explain the ways in which 'notions of nationhood are deeply embedded in contemporary ways of thinking'. This paper explores the observation that tourism is important both as a marker of changes in commercial practice and as a mediator of national (or quasi-national) self-description. The marketing of culture and location is, I suggest, premised on nodes of national identity. I contend that online, specifically, virtual, tourism makes these nodes visible as symptomatic of emerging and residual national and international imaginaries. Focussing on the phenomenon of virtual tourism the paper examines therefore web-based profiles of societies in political transition. Transition is defined in this context as a national or quasi-national community moving from one political sphere of influence to another. The case studies have been chosen to allow an examination of nationality and commercial practice in Europe and Asia, but with continual reference made to implicit and explicit transnational flows. Thus, Hong Kong is a quasi-national and postcolonial 'special administrative region', with a long history of British domination and a new history of democratic struggle. It is also struggling to maintain its position as the most popular Asian destination city for overseas and regional tourists. Scotland is a quasi-nation with, again, a long history of English domination and of Scottishness as a political identity, and a new history of growing autonomy within a larger European polis. Scotland is also a dab hand at the merchandising of local mythologies and cultural specificities for non-Scottish consumption. Finally, Hungary has often been cited as the mediating space between Soviet influence and the European west. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, Hungary has been working to remaster itself in terms that are legible to its immediate neighbours and to its desired allies in the EU. Hungary is a tourist venue of only modest proportions, but one where the creation of image could be crucial to long term national aspirations and economic stability. Laying across these case studies are three blocs of international imaginary organisation: the EU, the USA and the PRC. The European Union consists of nation states in perpetual negotiation over the sovereignty of a given nation and the pragmatic advantages of federated policy and trade initiatives. The constitutive states are on a spectrum between banal nationalism (Billig), and active nationalism. The US is a banal national space, underpinned by superpower status and extraordinary economic influence. All leading domain collectives (aviaton.com and so forth) are managed through US government edict. China (PRC) is falls between the banal and active categorisations of national consciousness. It assumes Chineseness as a place bound and racially bounded category, it also activates nationalism for immediate political objectives. I suggest that the study of cultural politics can be usefully worked alongside the analysis of commerce, new media and regulation to discover how nations are managing their domestic and international profiles. The research undertaken to develop this argument combines analyses of organisational change in an IT environment (with John Gammack), the political concept of nationhood, and of the relationship between political objectives and visual/textual representation. The argument traces both the expansion of US influence in the management of tourism domains online, and micro and national level attempts to combat this trend. The case studies exemplify a wider contextual shift in world politics and the status of nationhood as an organising concept within world economic and cultural flows. Catherine Driscoll (Adelaide University) WHAT WE ALL KNOW: CRITICAL THEORY AND GIRL CULTURE This paper moves from questions raised by the 1990s imperative to teach 'Theory' in Humanities and Social Sciences disciplines in what courses, to whom, to what ends, in what ways through debates about the rhetorical and political forms and effects of such theory. Given that an intersection of disciplinary and pedagogical histories cannot exclusively account for how theory is used, or for the relations between individuals and communities it presumes and constructs, I want to focus on how used now - between what groups, and in relation to what cultural fields. This paper simultaneously considers the constitution of Cultural Studies within the 'project' of late modernity and through the specific disciplines and critical practices emergent with Modernism. I want to argue both for the inevitability of theory in disciplines focussed on modern conceptions of the 'cultural', but also for the significance of the theoretically reflexive in contemporary Western culture. I argue that the emergence of Cultural Studies out of Modernism is tied to the constitution of the critical reflexive subject-positions it both analyses and constructs. I will use 'girl culture' as my central example both alien and all too familiar to 'cultural theory' focusing in particular on relations between girls' experiences and ideas about and images of girls: examples include the 'flapper' cultures of the 1920s, horror film, and the mesh of forms and practices comprising Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Geraint Evans (University of Sydney) THE PUBLIC SPHERE OF THE LITERARY CORRESPONDENCE: EDITORIAL PRACTICES AND MARKETING STRATEGIES The personal correspondence of writers has been an established genre of literary publication since Classical times, and has remained popular throughout the modern period. In the twentieth century the editing of literary correpondences often involved the same critical apparatus as the editing of other literary texts, and annotated correpondences were often marketed and published in the same format as the standard editions of canonical writers. A number of aspects of these textual productions needs to be theorised. Theories of editing and paleography, often absent or implicit in the critical apparatus, are among the most "traditional." More interestingly, perhaps, are theories of "difference" and "subjectivity" which might begin to establish the critical location of such texts. And Habermas‚s theorising of the public and the private sphere offers a critical vocabulary for examining the marketing of these texts as accidental revealers of intimacy and truth. This paper will examine some of these issues in relation to the editing of the letters of the Modernist writer David Jones, whose enormous surviving correspondence includes and discusses other writers and painters such as Eric Gill, Saunders Lewis, T. S. Eliot and Evelyn Waugh. Clifton Evers (University of Sydney) MASCULINITY AND ETHOLOGY. "Surfing has taken over from all the old sports" Deleuze This paper will propose an ethological turn‚ for understanding masculinity. Current investigations into masculinity provide an effective and panoramic tracing of masculinities but avoid a specific consideration of what is being lived?‚ Or in Braidotti's terms: what is occurring, concretely in the here and now? (Braidotti, 1994) A famous slogan in the surfing industry exclaims; "Only a surfer knows the feeling." As such, what interests me is how might I map masculinity differently while looking at the particular instance of surfing as an appropriate site. The paper will describe social, human and non-human interactions in a way that emphasises how one lives in [the feel], while constructing masculinity and surfing. This offers an opportunity to become familiar with issues and energies which can lie submerged, sometimes dangerously so, under the breaking waves. Sometimes when we pierce the surface we find other surfaces and plateaus whether they be jagged reef, rock shelves or other bodies swirling in the turbulence. I am curious as to the connections made, blockages occurring, assemblages taking place, and the intensities transmitted between wave and surfer and culture and. What moments of masculinity appear, disappear, swirl, intensify and send swell? Who rides these swells, what is it to ride them, how are they captured? There is a dynamic sliding between theory and practice. These questions draw me into a conceptual relation with the theories of Deleuze and Guattari. These two theorist's concepts of becoming‚, desiring machines‚ and molar molecular‚ lines can illuminate such considerations. A discussion of masculinity and surfing, with their speeds and movements, benefits from Deleuze and Guattari dropping in. To consider masculinity ethologically‚ is to consider the practice of masculinity that, I argue, has been under-considered. An ethological turn provides for not only unsettling practices of masculinity but presents a preferable understanding of the interconnections, movements and speeds. Brett Farmer (University of Melbourne) ABSOLUTELY FABULOUS: GAY DIVA WORSHIP AND/AS QUEER SUBLIMITY The spectacular female star or "diva" has long been mobilized within gay male cultures as a privileged figure of gay investment and identification. This paper addresses the queer appeal of the diva and explores some of the work - cultural, political and libidinal - that that this figure performs in gay male contexts. It mounts an argument for diva worship as a practice of queer sublimity, or what it terms "fabulousness", through which the gay subject seeks to transcend the heteronormativity of everyday life and to fashion his own set of utopian queer significations. John Frow (University of Edinburgh) THEORY AND SOCIAL DEMOCRACY In the last quarter of the last century the agenda of social- democratic politics shifted in ways that took many leftist intellectuals by surprise. We thought the agenda was socialist and democratic; it turned out to be neo-liberal and managerial. What surprised us was that this shift was almost never explicitly theorized and argued for; it was imposed by technocrats and careerists who just weren't reading the same books and journals we were. What theory there was (the methodological individualism of the Chicago School, for example) seemed hopelessly naïve to someone with a neomarxist intellectual training. Why did the shift happen? Why was theory‚ so irrelevant to it? Were there better reasons for it than were articulated at the time? And what are the alternatives for and/or to social democracy? Martin Fuglsang (Copenhagen Business School) BEYOND THE FETISHISM OF THE MOLAR - A REMARK ON THE EVENT AS FOLDED AFFECTS - Between his life and his death there is a moment that is no longer anything but a life playing with death. The life of an individual has given way to an impersonal and yet singular life that disengages a pure event freed from the accidents of the inner and outer life, that is, from the subjectivity and objectivity of what happens. A homo tantum with whom everyone sympathises and who attains a kind of beatitude. This is a heacceity, which is no longer an individuation, but a singularisation: a life of pure immanence, beyond good and evil Gilles Deleuze: L'immanence: Une Vie There is no longer a hidden meaning portrayed in the idea of authenticity we have to uncover, no Heideggerian prefecto figure on the side of being screaming towards Being, longing for a differenceless darkness, Being is by it self truly the differenciator of difference, the Fold, it is Ahab's Moby Dick as an endless whiteness, as a pure surface of heterogeneity and singularity, not in opposition to depth, but interpretation, and as such it is a experimentation of Becoming-Other. Experimentation has no beginning nor end, it always folds from the middle, breaking "words and things open", it is a force of desire, Spinoza's world, and in this sense it is of cause always an antagonism to any kind of theoretical gaze, as theory belongs to the plane of reference, the world of science, which have given up infinity to insert a reference which is able to actualise the virtual, because science, and by nature also analytical philosophy, produces statements or functions which are invoked in discursive regimens and which enable science to reflect and communicate, as the pure terror of the always already so well-known, but reflection is never thinking, thinking is experimentation, it takes up or lays down rhythms, as a way of freeing that Life which is captured in any kind of interiority, it is an irreducible exteriority, and comes into being as a line of flight. In this sense experimentation is on the edge to the Outside, a pure multiplicity beyond any form of negative dialectical negations, and as line of flight, it wanders, as a nomad, away from the phantasm of the state and the organisation and hunts an intensity and a precision before the codification takes place, before the moulding does its final work and tries to seize the singularity of the naked life in its invisibility, in its incompleteness, in its elusiveness or in short, in its rhizomatic Becoming-Other. If it is so, that experimentation is a stile of thinking and therefore so very far from the absent distance of theory, the reductional unity of One, then experimentation is no longer outside, before or after thought, but is in itself a thought, a thought who creates concepts and becomes affirmation of life, where we are beyond any theoretical, methodological and analytical strategy, because the Other, and thereby Otherness, is no longer a thing or anything which is on the outside of any gaze, and it is not just the double of One, but on the contrary, it becomes the double of other in a self, a force, so the problem concerning experimentation is how the double of other in a self is individuated inside the Event, the only philosophical concept that is "capable of ousting the verb 'to be' and attributes". This is a story about the Event, as an Eventum Tantum, never the Same and always as folded affects, a be-coming in the density of intensities, not the One, but the multiple, a singularisation as the rhythm between the virtual and the actual, and never the possible! Helen Fulton (University of Sydney) POST-STRUCTURALISM, POSTMODERNISM AND THE POLITICS OF 'ENG. LIT.' This paper argues that, in the discipline of English Literature, there has been a conflation of the theoretical concepts represented under the two headings of 'post-structuralism' and 'postmodernism'. The paper attempts to separate these two terms into meaningful concepts, and argues that the conflation represents a retreat from perceived theoretical 'difficulty' and 'jargon', and the promotion of an ideological agenda at the heart of 'Eng. Lit.' as a discipline. Robyn Gardner (University of Melbourne) AFFECT AND AUTISM: CONVERGENCE OR EMERGENCE IN PHILOSOPHY AND BIOLOGY, AND A NEW MIMESIS IN THEORY The theoretical definition and generalization of Austism is big business in biogenetic research contexts, not least in terms of pharmacological investment. If schizophrenia (its limit case and generalization) motivates much postwar philosophy and theory, autism (its limit case and generalization) will orient the future of humanities' theorizing. Whilst a liberatory interest in affect is strongly emergent in literary critical contexts, and a rethinking of simulation in contexts more attendant upon the 'image' than text, such work remains largely unconscious of, or unrelated to, biotechnological precedents and research interests. In the higher reaches of Francophile philosophy and German sociology, a canny rethinking of affect and autopoiesis is being mapped out, very consciously, in terms of old oppositions of right and left, of race and culture, in the name of a certain 'performative' imperative. The paper considers these directions in theory in terms of occult and unspoken implications, and in relation to biotechnological research interests. Mark Gibson (Murdoch University) THE ENGLISH NATIVES - CULTURAL STUDIES 'BEFORE THEORY' Cultural studies is often identified with the 'theoretical humanities' - the revolution in the English-language academy following the uptake in the 1970s of structuralism, Marxism and other Continental influences. There was a version of cultural studies, however, which developed earlier than, and independently from, these inspirations. In 'Cultural Studies - Two Paradigms', Stuart Hall refers to a 'native' tradition in Britain with a broad base in adult education, journalism and social documentary. Similar 'indigenous' projects can be found in Australia and North America. The paper argues that it is important to an understanding of the place of 'theory' in cultural studies that we recognise this earlier moment. In fact, the term itself may only make sense against such a background. An awareness of the contingency of the relation between theory and cultural studies also has implications for the present: If cultural studies existed 'before theory', then a close identification with theory might be thought of as only a phase, albeit an important one, in the history of the field. We are also led to reflect differently on even the most theoretical variants of cultural studies: These cannot simply be reduced to theory, but must be seen as involving a dialogue between theory and an older, Anglo-derived sense of political and intellectual vocation. Russell Goodwin (Monash University) RE-THEORISING PERFORMANCE: JOHN CAGE AND THE EARLY AVANT-GARDE. This paper will discuss the connections and similarities between the aspects of John Cage's musical aesthetic and the works of avant-garde theatre from the early part of the Twentieth Century. In the early 1950s, John Cage challenged accepted notions of what was considered to be a musical performance. By incorporating what was traditionally regarded as 'non-musical' elements in his work, John Cage actively blurred the distinction between music and theatre and directly influenced succeeding generations of composers and performance artists from the late 1950‚s and beyond. If Cage's influence is traceable in the music and performance works of following generations, are works that were produced prior to Cage's influence up for similar scrutiny? Can the achievements of one figure, affect our assessment of works that did not have this figure in mind? Is this method of re-theorising artistic practice desirable? Christina Gordan (Curtin University of Technology) ALL THAT'S LEFT OF POLITICS: THE STATE, SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY I will address the issues raised in the conference synopsis by way of a discussion that will locate a specific context to the 'kind' of theory that it seeks to address. Initially I would like to ask the question; is theory in and of itself, a leftist enterprise? Theory and theoretical discourse operates within and across disciplinary and political boundaries, marked by practices and processes of appropriation to specific fields of enquiry. To suggest that all theory belongs to the left, or for that matter, that critical thought exists without some relationship to theory as a right wing enterprise, seems to me a little strange. As such, "the so-called theory wars", to which the synopsis refers, might be read in terms of a project/agenda that holds an implicit attack on specifically Marxist theoretical models. The paper argues that political theory in general (that is, regardless of its positioning in terms of a right or left wing orientation), in its attempt to engage with the material and social make-up of its theoretical body politic, appropriates epistemological models that have been constructed in the fields of science and philosophy. Secondly, therefore, I would like to consider how theory operates differentially in and through the discourses of science and philosophy. I will do this with reference to Deleuze and Guattari's distinction between the function of science and the creativity of philosophy in regard to their respective relationships to the virtual. I will then consider the political domain by introducing the distinction Deleuze and Guattari make between State science/philosophy and Nomadic science/philosophy. Here, while retaining the distinction between the two, they define a difference between methods in both science and philosophy that work in favour of supporting dominant political agendas (the State), and those that operate outside these agendas (the Nomads). Finally, I will return to the question in debate and suggest that the attack on Marxist theory is not a rejection of a leftist ethics of political revolution, but rather an attack on the left's reliance upon epistemological models formed under the authority and control of the very State to which its own critical thinking claims to be in revolt. In other words, I'm suggesting that the attack is aimed at a fundamental paradox in Marxist theories that on the one hand claim to be a politics of the people while on the other, model those people on philosophical and scientific knowledge produced under the authority of a dominating State. As such, rather than read the situation as a negation of a leftist enterprise, this paper reads it as an impasse. If the left can't be sure of the epistemological foundations of the theories upon which its arguments have historically evolved, then how can it re-position and re-assure itself of its own ethical ideal? This then poses a real challenge to thinking the leftist enterprise differently. A differential thinking that may well begin, at least in part, by considering minority and nomadic knowledge (not simply the authoritative representations of and as 'otherness') constructed outside the modelling of the dominating State. Anna Hickey-Moody (University of SA) MESSTUP' AND MOUTHIN' OFF: 'THEORY' IS HIS EVERY FART AND COUGH In this paper I posit hip-hop music as being representative of theory within hip-hop culture. Specifically, I explore the controversy that has surrounded the work of the morally conservative American hip-hop rapper Eminem. I suggest that his work is a site of praxis for a range of discourses that are accorded positions of power within popular culture. His work supports and reproduces heteronormative performances of gender and sexuality, while his success as a white male in an Afro-American based music culture can be read as the re-telling of colonialist triumph. However, while Eminem has gained media exposure on account of his 'whiteness', he has been attacked for the performance of cultural norms traditionally associated with re-enforcing the unity and strength of Afro-American culture. In some respects, media focus on Eminem's 'whiteness' has masked what has ostensibly been a critique of his performance of 'blackness.' There are also aspects of his work that subvert confined constructions of gender and heteronormativity. I argue that the media's limited understanding of his subversion of normative identity has impacted upon the more critical elements of his work. Michael Hollington (UNSW) 'ESSAIS' AT THE LOUVRE: REFLECTIONS ON DERRIDA AND KRISTEVA My paper concerns two unorthodox catalogues for two exhibitions of drawings chosen by these writers in a series of shows at the Louvre. These texts might principally be thought of as 'essais', a distinctive French genre of philosophical writing, and in this sense, might exemplify 'what's left of theory'. I argue that the particular ways in which they blur and straddle conventional generic demarcation lines - they could also be thought of as autobiographical texts, for instance - might offer pointers to strategic 'non-instrumental' ways of using and promoting theory. I argue too that these texts can be approached as poetic structures, and that their difficulty, as well as the pleasure of reading them, is comparable to that of modernist poetry. Rosemary Huisman (Sydney University) THE LANGUAGE OF THEORY AND LANGUAGE AS THEORY. What is theory? We all know that this is the kind of essentialist question which post-structuralist perspectives cannot abide. It has that claim to metalanguage which Jakobson named in his linguistics and Derrida denied in his metaphysical critique of metaphysics. It exhibits that "will to truth" which Foucault describes as characteristic of the Western tradition of discourse. It assumes a Platonic idealism, if we expect an absolute and decontexualised answer, such as Peirce rejected in his later move towards a scholastic or Aristotelian Realism (a move towards 'community' rather than theory). Yet to acknowledge these limitations is merely to acknowledge the limitation of any approach which effaces perspective, which claims an objectivity independent of any subject. It is not to claim that theory, contextualised, grounded, is not possible. (To assume "theory" was a "leftish enterprise", and therefore now to reject it, is to base the rejection on the very theory being rejected ˆ that of a monoperspective ˆ which is a nice example of subject-de-construction.) In this paper, I consider some of the grounds on which "known objects" have been theorised, in logic, science and literature. In particular I will consider procedures of generalisation and abstraction, and the three practices of deduction, induction and abduction (the last from Peirce). I suggest that what we have called Œtheory‚, in certain institutional fields/contexts of discourse in which intellectual capital is significant, is no more than an overt extension of the very possibilities of the practice of language, and that the value given to 'theory', in one context or another, is dependent not on the procedures/processes used but on the discursive context in which those procedures are invoked. Melissa Iocco (University of Adelaide) "HE'S VERY PALE...COVERED WITH SCARS": WHAT'S LEFT OF THE 'ABJECT' IN FIGHT CLUB AND CRASH? This paper considers the limits of Julia Kristeva's psychoanalytic theory of the 'abject' as an approach to body-horror in the films Fight Club (1999) and Crash (1996). I will use the example of 'the scar' to explore how power, subversion and culture may be read in terms other than repressive law, desiring-lack and intrasubjective-depth. The 'abject' has been a most common and popular way to explore issues of power, subversion and culture, in relation to representations of horror in film. This psychoanalytic theory has been of interest to feminist film theorists as it offers an understanding of the social and historical constructions of sexed difference in body-horror and film. The abject offers a psychoanalytic explanantion for the of the 'feminine' body as 'defiling' and 'fluid', 'viscous' and 'abject', and the masculine body as a 'universal' model for the 'hard', 'closed', 'clean and proper' body. However, the theory of the abject makes the relationship between gendered subjects and horror difficult challenge, change or expand - particularly the relationship between the 'white' 'male' body and body-horror. The theory of the 'abject' is problematic because it conceives of power in terms of an oppressive law, and subversion in terms of desiring-lack. Furthermore, culture and the body are understood as outward reflections of intra-subjecitve depth. I argue that body-horror in film, and its intersections with power, subversion and culture, can better be understood in terms of 'desiring-production' and bodily inscription. I will use the example of 'the scar' from the films Fight Club and Crash to demonstrate the limitations of, and alternatives to, the 'abject'. David Jack WHAT'S LEFT OF PRAXIS - A ROLE FOR PUBLIC INTELLECTUALISM? Thought is not an economic privilege! Yet this it how it seems today when our leading academics retire to their crystal palaces to construct hovels (to reverse the well-known criticism directed at philosophers). Theory needs to be reunited with its object - the real social relations of human beings ˆ if it is to live again. Otherwise let's consign it to the ashcan of history and R.I.P! So, what‚s left of theory? Let us turn to Sartre: 'A finished, already outdated mode of culture, something like a brand of soap' in other words, an idea. What's left is 'theory for theory's sake', an idea-soap which doesn't wash any more. And if we are to talk of commodification (and this includes the so-called postmodern colonisation of theory) can we not say that theory has lost its use-value, and hence its exchange-value? If theory is what's left of Marxism, and cultural studies is what's left of theory, then isn't what's needed a dialectical movement, something in the order of a progressive-regressive method, a learning from our mistakes directed toward a future? As Zizek has pointed out, the "duty of the critical intellectual - if in today's postmodern universe, this syntagm has any meaning left - is precisely to occupy all the time" We should then embrace the connotation in what's "Left" of theory‚ as it drifts more and more away from its real raison d'etre - the mode of production. When John Howard claimed in his victory speech, for an election won and lost through terror, that Australia is "the best nation in the world", a hole opened up - the place for the public intellectual? For who else is up to the task of demystifying this sort of profoundly nationalistic remark? And what of the contradiction between global accountability and more pressing local concerns: just how big is our own backyard? Maybe theory really does have to rediscover the dialectic, which, to use Jameson‚s formulation, points "beyond the words to the thing itself". Laleen Jayamanne (University of Sydney) " 'WHERE THE RAINBOW ENDS'; ALICE THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASSES - STANLEY KUBRICK'S EYES WIDE SHUT" According to Sam Neill The Thin Red Line is one of the most underrated recent films and I would like to add Eyes wide Shut to this list as well. My paper will present an image of Kubrick's authorship (I don't think we are done with great auteurs yet) and will analyse the virtual-actual couples Tom and Nicole & Bill and Alice as they are encased in a crystalline image. The implications of this entrapment and the crack in the crystal and what it enables will be explored. This is to say that the image is prior to the story. How did we fail to see this movement and the myriad micro-movements in this film? This paper will use several Deleuzean concepts to explore these movements. Lawrence Johnson (University of Queensland) FOUCAULT'S UNSPECTACULAR TOOLBOX In "Intellectuals and Power" Michel Foucault suggests that the emergence of the "specific intellectual" is made possible, post-1968, by the merging of theory and practice. Foucault's argument is framed by the conception of theory as a toolbox, with the usefulness of any theory always being contingent rather than universal. In what has recently been dubbed the "theory wars," however, theory's detractors have contended that the activities of intellectuals undertaken in the name of "theory" over the last few decades have been far from specific, contingent or practical. While making no secret of my own position as an exponent of theory, I want to take a few moments in this paper to consider whether the specific intellectual ever really had its day in the light. Has the merger of theory with practice-rather than ground theory in specific objects-resulted only in the abstraction of practice? Has "theory" simply become an empty referent, the proper name under the aegis of which academics play the same language games over and over in what Foucault once labelled "the fantasia of the library"? If this the case, have we therefore lost sight of Foucault's vision of a specific intellectual? My argument will be that Foucault's vision requires the distinction between theory and practice, every bit as much as it rests on their union. Notwithstanding Jacques Derrida's warnings (from "White Mythology" to "The Principle of Reason" and "The Laws of Reflection") about giving preference to sensing through the eyes even when we have no action in view, this paper will attempt to integrate Derridean reflections on theoria and praxis into Foucault's vision of a specific intellectual, in arguing that the conception of theory as a toolbox always risked blinding theory by removing from it altogether its sense of the spectacular. Louise Johnson (Deakin University) WHAT IS LEFT OF THE ARTS? In an age of globalisation, economic restructuring and rampant consumption, the "cultural industries" have come to be viewed as offering a source of social and economic salvation to declining towns, cities and regions. However, it is far from clear whether the arts, media and related tourism create employment, wealth, capital and community cohesion. What then is the value of the cultural industries and what concepts can be deployed to answer this question? This paper will report on one effort to assess the value of the cultural industries in one small Australian city. Drawing on Marxism, feminism and Pierre Boudieu, it will develop a particular concept of "cultural capital" for use in quantifying and qualifying the socio-economic contribution of the cultural industries in Geelong, Victoria. It will argue that by linking Marx to Bourdieu around reformulated notions of "value" and "cultural capital" much can be distilled from what is left of the arts. Gail Jones (University of Western Australia) EMPATHETIC UNSETTLEMENT": READING THE TRAUMA MODEL IN CULTURAL STUDIES Taking as its point of departure Simon Critchley's statement (on Levinas) that "ethics is traumatology", this paper questions the use of the metaphorics of trauma in cultural and literary studies. In general terms it asks whether we are disciplinarily indentured to the model of a fundamentally disabled subject, perpetually suspended in damage or incompletion. (This is variously represented as failing communicative competence, awaiting reciprocal friendship, caught in 'enlightened false consciousness', divested of authenticity, dispersed in identity, and so on.) The traumatised subject, hyperbolically construed as existing in a state of arrest, repetition and lack, is in some ways paradigmatic in contemporary cultural theorising. Of related interest is what might be called the traumatic turn in cultural, historical and literary studies, the employment of trauma models to read and interpret historical damage and oppression. What does it mean to construct 'others' using metaphors of trauma? How do we avoid newly pathologizing those who have suffered historical disadvantage and danger? What distinctions do we need to make between metaphysical propositions (like those of Levinas) and the urgent need to make manifest an ethical charter in our scholarly forms and practices? These questions turn on a certain anxiety about recovering a politics of reading in the face of what Timothy Bewes calls 'postmodern cynicism' and the melancholic presuppositions of the postmodern subject here described. This paper takes as its focus the case of "stolen generation" narratives, the personal testimonials of Aboriginal Australians who between approximately 1910 and 1970 were systematically removed from indigenous families, by means of force or coercion, in order to be relocated in institutions or white foster homes. Assimilationist eugenics, disregard for indigenous culture and outright racism, combined to construct statist intervention aimed at eradicating Aboriginality. Using Dominick LaCapra's recommendation of "empathetic unsettlement" as a critical posture in approaching historical victims, this paper will discuss the adequacy of heuristic models of trauma, the narrative drive to elegy and redemption, and the possibilities of a postcolonial ethics that might address testimonial forms with hesitation, care, and due regard for the temptations of vicarious othering or identification. Darren Jorgensen (University of Western Australia) THE MOB, A POLITICS OF THE UNINTELLIGIBLE Thinking through the unintelligible is a way of confronting a range of realities that we may ordinarily need to ignore just to function as a society. A range of contemporary philosophy and theory, from Lyotard's differend to Zizek's revival of the Lacanian Real, is concerned with this very presentation of the unintelligible. Such presentations are often accompanied by a sense of their necessity, as if approaching what defies our symbolic systems is of crucial political importance. This necessity may well be a historical one, the drive toward a greater sense of unmediated reality motivated by an age of unchecked representation and theoretical extrapolation. Yet there is also something within the subject matter of the unintelligible itself that demands our attention. It is this very demand that mediates the tension between the unintelligible and its presentation. This paper looks at a body of writing by Georges Bataille, Maurice Blanchot and Jean-Luc Nancy so as to explore this principle tension and how it operates as social critique. These writers turn to the unintelligible to make paradigmatic shifts that render transparent some of the most prevalent constructions of the social. To imagine these generalisations, I turn to the image of the mob. The mob destroys the internal barricades and conspicuous symbols of the city without belonging to the logic of the city itself. It embodies a revolution without speech, its language asocial. There is also a sense of necessity operating within the mob itself, an urgency belonging to itself as its own subject. This asocial character of the unintelligible is at odds with its valuable critical function in theory. Thierry Jutel (University of Otago) THE ECSTASIES OF THE NEO-LIBERAL SUBJECT In an untranslated book entitled Vivre et penser comme des porcs (To Live and Think Like Pigs) the mathematician and philosopher Gilles Châtelet (1998) points out that neo-liberal ideology has reconstituted itself as a discourse of exhilaration, and transformation and as a festive celebration of an ecstatic individual freed from the weight of ideology, community and conviction. Following Châtelet, this paper proposes to analyze the conditions of the evolved neo-liberal subject's existence. From the new managerial culture of the "enchanted employee" to the economy of affect in media culture, fluidity, reaction, and stimulation are the tools of economic, political and cultural transformation. In this neo-liberal conception the individual's degree of success and adaptive talents are measured by his or her experience of ecstasy: a new class has come into being, a new aristocracy of affect. Yet, in what must constitute one of the most trenchant ironies of our times, the characteristics attributed to this ecstatic subject (stimulation, responsiveness…) are also used to describe the degeneration of everyday life mainly through the curse of popular culture. If the caffeinated, multitasking and exhilarated employee is the key to the recasting of economic and political relations in the neo-liberal fairy tale, the hyperactive, intoxicated and dissipated individual may be its illegitimate sibling consigned to oblivion. Drawing on the writings of Châtelet, Deleuze, Guattari and others the paper will discuss the ecstasies of the neo-liberal subject and the necessity for theory to engage more directly with the battle played out in the politics of affect. Helen Keane (University of New South Wales) SEX/GENDER AND THE MALE STEROID USER In medical and popular texts the male steroid user is generally produced as a site of disordered and excessive masculinity. His hypertrophied muscles, his intensive workouts, his aggression and his intake of large amounts of supplemental 'male sex hormone' form an arresting and disturbing assemblage. Indeed, Elizabeth Grosz (1994) has suggested that the body builder is attempting to render the whole boy into the phallus: hard and impenetrable. But there are tensions in the links between masculinity, maleness and steroids, for example the steroid user is sometimes diagnosed as suffering from 'reverse anorexia' caused by a feminine vulnerability to media images and body ideals. And his body is also vulnerable to side effects such as the growth of breast tissue because of the ability of the body to convert excess testosterone into the 'female' hormone oestrogen. Given the corporeal and cultural instability of the male steroid user, which underlies a surface of stereotypical masculinity, this paper argues that these subjects offer an interesting opportunity for the examination of theories of sexual difference and the distinction between sex and gender. Here it draws on the early work of corporeal feminists, but also utilises the more recent analyses of Bernice Hausman (1997) and Elizabeth Wilson (1998). It also suggests that the rise in concern about bodybuilding and steroid use can be usefully placed in the context of contemporary discourses of masculinity in crisis. Susan Knabe WHAT'S LEFT OF HISTORY: HISTORICAL NARRATIVES, GENOCIDE, AND AIDS What I would like to do in this paper is look at the implications of a specific intersection between factors which Michel Foucault suggests underwrite the myth of the modern homosexual and the surplus meanings generated by the mobilization of a series of historical moments in the formation of gay, lesbian, and queer identity. In particular, I would like to focus on the rhetorical usage, early in the AIDS crisis, of genocide and, specifically, the Holocaust. In doing so, I will be looking at the ways in which it is possible to situate theories of homosexuality and the homosexual within modernist discourses of authenticity and development which, while they are available historically as reverse discourses, nevertheless also contain the traces of more sinister possibilities associated with immanence and identity. Drawing on Zygmunt Bauman's analysis of the relationship between aspects of modernity and the Holocaust (specifically the ways in which modernity and its central precepts facilitated those aspects of the Holocaust we most seek to dismiss as a failure of the civilizing process), I will be looking first (and briefly) at the ways in which homosexuals (and homosexuality) were positioned within the rhetoric of the Endlösung. I will then focus on the ways in which contemporary attempts to mobilize this history, primarily in an attempt to conceptualize responses to the AIDS crisis, contain within themselves aspects which have hitherto escaped critical analysis. My paper will attempt to begin this task of analysis and will, possibly, suggest alternative ways in which historical moments might be mobilized in the service of apprehending the magnitude of the AIDS crisis. Colleen Lamos (Rice University) THE LIFE OF THEORY Literary theory has, by the 21st century, become "literary theories," pluralized and dispersed into multiple intellectual pursuits. Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan's 1998 collection, Literary Theory: An Anthology, for example, is divided into ten sections, ranging from Formalisms to Cultural Studies, many with their own subdivisions. If theory is dead, it has left an extensive and vigorous progeny. The health of an academic enterprise may be gauged in part by the interest of students in pursuing work in the field. I will begin by describing my experience teaching theory courses in the English Department of Rice University in Houston, Texas. At the moment I am teaching a course entitled, "What's Left of Theory?"--inspired by the book of the same name, edited by Judith Butler, et al., and using Rivkin and Ryan's anthology as one of my textbooks. Enrollment in the course has been high and there is keen interest in it amongst those who are not enrolled, including faculty members. Many students want to get a grasp of "theory," both because of their intellectual curiosity and because a command of it has become a prerequisite for academic success throughout the humanities and social sciences. In short, theory has become canonized. While canonization marks the institutional success of an academic movement, it may, nonetheless, sound its death knell. When teaching Derrida, for instance, I have a bizarre sense of trying to rekindle the now cold intellectual passion that I felt twenty-five years ago in order to convey to my students what a difference differance once made and how it altered subsequent ways of thinking. It's a bit like trying to explain an old love affair. That flame springs to life again, though, when we turn to Judith Butler or Homi Bhabha, and to the political ramifications of their writings. Catharina Landstrom (University of Western Sydney) SCIENCE AS CULTURE: BIOLOGICAL CONTROL IN AUSTRALIA This paper argues that present day science ought to be analysed as a site for cultural production, as well as for cognitive and material construction. Drawing on examples from research in biological control of vertebrates, weeds and marine organisms in Australia, three aspects of this technoscience are addressed. Firstly, I will talk about the relevance of communication with non-science actors for the research process in biological control. The second topic is the relationship between biological control researchers' communication to the public and surrounding cultural formations. Finally, I will discuss the rationale of Cultural Studies of Science as a 'materialist constructionist' approach, creating a critical theory of science. CJP Lee (University of Central Lancashire) FROM THE DEATH OF THEORY TO DEATH AS THEORY- A NEW APPROACH TO THEORY AND THE HORROR FILM In 'Film Theory and the revolt against master narratives' Bill Nichols argues that there have been a number of valuable film theories that relate to three stages in cultural studies. These include: a Marxist concept of culture as a realm of symbolic production linked to a society's economic mode of production and the perpetuation of its existing, hierarchical relations; a semiotic theory of sign systems that can grasp the organizational subtleties of film form; formalist and neo-formalist notions of film structure as a semi-autonomous domain with an internal history of development and a self-contained system of signification; a psychoanalytical theory of the subject whose use of sign systems is always tied to issues of gender, desire and the unconscious; a post-structural theory of narrative as a process of lending meaning to the historical world by investing the historical world with those meanings narrative form provides; and a phenomenology of film experience as a visceral, existential mode of encounter irreducible to concepts and categories. Nichols explains that the study of the visual is no longer about the verifying of facts pertaining to an objective world because the visual now constitutes the terrain of subjective experience as the locus of knowledge, and power. Again with reference to Jameson, Nichols claims narrative cinema constructs the reality it claims to represent but theory stands as a representation of how we wish to engage with the world. There has been a move from the general to the specific, to eke out the individual rather than collective, and this in itself can be read as anti-leftist. However, to maintain that humans are constructed by language or by the visual is to limit human and humanist experience. In this paper I maintain that while most theory has claimed to be a leftist enterprise, it is in reality a search for truths that move away from the physical nature of reality, in an attempt to maintain timelessness in a finite existence, to reach beyond. Theories exploring ideology can be read as modern theorisations of evil, that which supposedly penetrates all beings and controls the masses. Theory with its texts, saints, sinners and disciples, is a substitute for religion. I examine these points by an exploration of the contemporary horror film, which deals explicitly with the theme of mortality, usually utilising visceral means. Ironically, to meditate on death is to enhance life, a Buddhist philosophy that horror films in general proclaim, hence their popularity and horror's success over all other film genres. Capitalism creates an illusion of infinity by situating the fulfilment of desire in a future period by consumption now, creating a neophiliac culture that needs heaven immediately. A lack of fulfilment always comes with the assumed latent belief in a soon to be satisfied fulfilment. An art form and a theory surrounding it that confronts the abject, the demonic and often the hellish, can be read as leftist, as it denies the dominant ideology. Through analysis of contemporary horror film, I explore these points, moving on from psychoanalytic and phenomenological arguments into a cultural ontology that is both holistic and specific. By doing so we find that the god of theory is far from dead, as it is resurrected within each text that deals reflectively with the problematic of death, death being both the creator and denier of meaning, and the elaboration of versions of meaning being the limbo within which theoreticians live. Natalya Lusty (University of Sydney) CINDY SHERMAN, JUDITH BUTLER AND THE CRISIS OF THE FEMINIST SUBJECT This paper will explore the crisis of the female/feminist subject in the work of Cindy Sherman in the context of Judith Butler's work on parody and performativity. Focusing on Sherman's series, The Sex Pictures, I argue that this body of work responds to both a Surrealist fetishisation of the female body as well as feminism's critical ambivalence toward Sherman's work. Recently Sherman has suggested that The Sex Pictures began as a response to the increasing climate of censorship and moral panic surrounding an exhibition of Robert Mapplethorpe's work in the early 1990's. I argue that the critical censure of Mapplethorpe's homoerotic images served as a reminder to Sherman of the censorship of her Centrefold series during the 1980's, by the so-called progressive art journal, Artforum. In reading Sherman's work in the context of Butler's disarticulation of the traditional link between sex and gender within feminist theory, this paper frames the notion of crisis at the juncture of theory and representation. I argue that in rendering visible the phantasmatic structure of identity, Sherman's images and Butler's theories counter a proscriptive discourse on sexuality, that dominated both the left and the right throughout the 1980's and early 1990's. Moreover, Martha Nussbaum's recent vituperative attack on Butler, published in The New Republic in 1999, highlights the sense in which these difficult but familiar questions within feminism - about the competing claims of theory, experience, and politics - are still haunting us. John Lyall (UNITEC, Auckland) FERAL THEORY Theory may well now be left‚ as a feral entity, able to survive in its new home, long after the delicate exotic introduced original idea has withered in the terrain of the antipodes. The wilful proliferation of ideas and images inhabit niches unimagined by their authors. The paper proposes Feral Theory as such an adapted body of theory; a piece of Postcolonial Deconstruction. Feral Theory will be used to track an hyperbolic [and quite apocryphal] history of a diasporic and accelerated sublime as it runs wild and adapts in new loci. From Captain Cook to A.J.Hackett , a leap into the vista of theory. Paul Magee THE BODY OF WORK "The idea of the book, which always refers to a natural totality, is profoundly alien to the sense of writing," wrote Jacques Derrida, in 1967, heralding a concept of writing as global as the phenomenon of signification itself. Showing "signs of liberation all over the world," this new "science of writing" would entail a veritable "destruction of the book" - though I suspect the philosopher's writing might have run away with him here. For the thing about this idea - the totalizing book, which attempts to contain the excess of signification, of differance - is that it sounds remarkably similar to Jacques Lacan's idea of the Imaginary, that "illusion of unity" that is the sense of one's own body. In fact, it seems to me that the formal analogy between the book and the body is the reason why we enjoy reading. "It has always appeared to me," wrote Edgar Allan Poe, in The Philosophy of Composition, "that a close circumspection of space is absolutely necessary to the effect of insulated incident - it has the force of a frame to a picture." For Poe, such containment (one could think of the stage, the cinema or TV screen, but again, also the body) constitutes that "vastly important artistic element, totality, or unity, of effect," the framing device necessary to channel aesthetic pleasure. Taking Derrida's "idea of the book" as my point of departure, I argue that the aesthetic and its various framing devices are as global as writing itself. And that work is one of them. Work - not merely the work of art, but work itself - is as much a frame for pleasure as any cinema screen. Why not? It is precisely the opposition - so essentialist, so prescriptive and so Australian - between work and pleasure which fires current attacks upon the very Humanities Departments in which we work ("they're just enjoying themselves" - as if politicians, CEOs and vice-chancellor's weren't doing the same). What's left for theory - once it turns from "the destruction of the book" to the enjoyment of the body - is to attack the notion that uncreative wage labour is a social obligation, that work must, simply by definition, be a pain. There's a politics for Deconstruction there. Peter McCarthy (University of Technology, Sydney) 'MARGINALIST' CRITICISM, AN INFANTILE DISORDER? This paper takes a look at something of a fork in the road of Theory and its various diluted and bastardised forms that have emerged transcendent, if not entirely triumphant, in the Humanities and social sciences in recent years. Key to this juncture is what may be termed 'the new marginalism', a particular liberal intellectual disposition which in fact appears to abnegate any notion of real positionality, political, theoretical or otherwise. Relatively recent theories and readings of culture and criticism (born, by and large, of various incantations of continental philosophy, postmodern theorising, post-colonial theory and even post-theory) have lauded this #marginalised verse&, courting its authors in what now amounts to an institutionalised Third Worldism-a cultural, political and theoretical minoritarianism now normative in its scope and influence. The marginalist critic seeks first to relate to and identify with some figure of alienation or extraordinary 'otherness'. These are invariably drawn from the ranks of the meek, the alienated and the vanquished-lost souls staring from innumerable galleries and exhibitions of (mostly modern) horror. Having identified, adopted and ultimately usurped the very subject-position of their lost or victimised 'other' (and so erasing their own), the marginalist has transcended the mantle of their own subject-position and raised themselves to the position of their 'host' subject, simultaneously privileging the place of their own identification while silencing it. The marginalist critic advances by means of a disavowal of position: eschewing the very positionality they hold (real subject-position, responsibility, reflexivity) in favour of one with which they will come only to identify. Any potential position of critical enunciation-the very reason for identification in the first place-is simply null. Important here, I argue, is the masking of a certain fantasy of rupture: a kind of projection on a subject divided and alienated by the very centre and logic from which such projection is allowed and which-even by marginalist critics' own reckoning-defines such division. Fantasy emerges from a bad faith marginalism, an inversion of truly marginalised experience as the marginalist comes to occupy new sexual, racial, existential and/or geo-political territory. Herein lies the baleful paradox of the new marginalism. Its privileging of particular and yet putatively politically disinterested theories of culture belies residence within a simplistic Manicheanism of its own-a simple movement, still, between "us and them".Picking up on Edward Said's 'dream-work' line of argument in his Orientalism, I argue we have here a sort of manifest marginalism-"the various stated views about marginalised cultures, minority discourses, literatures, history", etc.-and, more importantly, a latent marginalism: the unconscious expression of a fantasy or a desire to be or to have the deracinated and marginalised others "feminine penetrability" and "supine malleability"-not unlike what Kristeva has called a "fantasy of incorporation ... by means of which I attempt to escape fear." This marginalist disposition, I argue, has more often than not stumbled on the theoretical relation between Nietzschean and Hegelian readings of culture and philosophy. Nietzsche's theoretical "down-going" (Untergehen) and Hegel's "dialectical overcoming" (Aufhebung) have exerted a critical influence on readings of culture, particularly in the political and theoretical wash-up of the sixties. It lies at the core of the question: "What's Left of theory?" This paper looks at the impact on politics of some relatively recent marginalist jockeying and the "culture industry" of which some of its avatars have become patrons. The failure of the new marginalism to accommodate the ever-present fantasy of rupture in their own intellectual Heimat, is at the root of a crisis in recent critical theory that seems little recognised in the currently fashionable post(s) of Theory and Politics. Analysing a range of positions within various media-from literature, film and theory itself-this paper explores the problem of the diminishing positionality of theory and politics and asks why the new marginalism needs to 'go down' on theory and its place in politics in order to find its own paradoxical place in the sun. Ian McLean (University of Western Australia) WHAT'S LEFT OF THE AVANT-GARDE: ART CRITICISM IN THE AGE OF THEORY Avant-gardism is a Leninist metaphor for a revolutionary posture. Today it describes a general mentality considered characteristic of, and essential to, contemporary art, whatever its content or style. Most people presume that contemporary artists aspire to be avant-gardist, that art schools teach students to be avant-garde artists, that contemporary art spaces exhibit avant-garde art, that art journals publicise and analyse it, and that funding bodies subsidise it. Yet never has avant-gardism been so disavowed by critics than in the age of theory. This paper discusses the historical context and theoretical debates of the theory driven art-criticism that emerged in the 1980s, and asks where its revolutionary desires and the leftist principles avant-gardism have been sublimated? Andrew McNamara (Queensland University of Technology) LACK OF JUDGEMENT? MEDIUM SPECIFICITY AND A THOROUGHLY MODERN ART The American critic, Clement Greenberg, laid claim to formalism as a means to uphold judgment in terms of the claims of the autonomous medium in modern art - in this case, famously, adhering to the flatness of the painted canvas. According to Greenberg's model, judgment operates more like a thumb or down model that arbitrates and presides over what is good or bad. This paper poses the question of how far it is possible to diverge from this critical model since most knowledge claims, whether say upholding the claims of high culture or kitsch (Greenberg) or the academy or outside, all harbour notions of identifying claims of validity in terms of aptness to a model. Thumbs up or thumbs down again. This paper examines propositions raised in a trilogy of essays by Samuel Weber on Kant. Can there be judgment without a medium? It will consider Weber's own alignment of modern art with modern technological (and representational) thinking. To quote Weber: "…whether in economic practice or modern art, objects are de-objectified by becoming increasingly subject to the calculations of a subjective will struggling to realize its representations and thereby to place itself in security." (Mass Mediauras, 73) How does Weber's suggestions about ambivalence (borrowing from Freud) operate as an alternative strategy? Howard McNaughton (Canterbury) CULTURAL STUDIES, THEORY, AND THE CURRICULUM In 2002, Canterbury becomes the first university in Aotearoa/NZ to offer a BA major in Cultural Studies. At the same time, the TEAC commission is carrying out a radical review of the curriculum in the name of the knowledge economy, and Canterbury is implementing staff redundancies because of falling student numbers. What room is there for theory in a market-driven university whose shop windows have always celebrated practice? This question became acute with the introduction of an entry-level course in Cultural Studies in 2001, targeting students with no theoretical background and a sketchy idea of what constitutes Cultural Studies itself. Putting together a list of learning outcomes was easy: we wanted students to develop a foundational knowledge of the production and reception of the cultural text, how competing notions of "culture", "cultural value", and "taste" impact on it, and how notions of history, popular and élite culture, globalisation, power, sexuality, and gender bear on it. Such issues, however, turned out to be self-evident to today's students, and the course quickly came to pivot on how quickly students became convinced of the value of finding a theoretical purchase. This paper outlines some aspects of this course development. Scott McQuire (University of Melbourne) FROM GLASS ARCHITECTURE TO BIG BROTHER This paper examines the concept of transparency as both an architectural and political value. Beginning with the utopic 'glass architecture' schemes of the modernist European avant-garde, I want to explore the ways in which electronic media have contributed to the transformation of this discourse. Recent interactions between media and architecture, from personal webcams to interactive building surfaces to the proliferation of 'open house' media projects such as the Big Brother franchise will be considered as examples of the contemporary reconfiguration of public and private space. Bent Meier (Copenhagen Business School) SCHIZO-ANALYTICS AND ROYAL SCIENCE: HOW IS A NOMADIC SCIENCE POSSIBLE? This paper aims to explore the connection between institutionalized science and 'political' science, a connection in which 'theory' plays a crucial role. The field is described as a struggle between the State apparatus, or the machines of re-territorialisation and nomad science, or the nomad war machine of de-territorialisation. In this exploration the demarcation between literary theory and social science is deconstructed. The French, in lack of better words, post-structuralist social philosophers and interventionists Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari - the sources of the above concepts - present in Kafka, Toward a Minor Literature a radical new reading of the Jewish/German novelist. In this reading the movement of Kafka's literary project is seen in a dual optic (an optic which is, however, later to be deconstructed): the bent head/portrait photo versus the straightened head/musical sound. The critical difference lies in the way movement is produced by these different optics. The first allows only movement within the given diagrammatics of a blocked, neutralized desire, childhood memories and striated territory, whereas the latter allows the production of desire, lines of flight that opens up to new connections and at the same time a strategy that blocks childhood memory. Expressed in terms of ideology the first reading strategy is an Oedipal stratification: it considers desire as a lack, and it works by a univocal interpretation as it always refer to that original 'sin' which is Oedipus' desire for his mother and the killing of his father. Josef K. is Oedipalized in the sense that his virtual (i.e.: real) sum of possibilities is reduced via interpretation. The second strategy, which is the production of desire, connects to Schizo-analytics as a revolutionary or 'minor' literary strategy: here, Josef K. is concieved as an assemblage, and different possible actualisations are explored. These are actualisations which moves forward and connects to other assemblages in non-linear and heterogeneous ways. Instead of the (literary) drama being solved (via the question of the father), Josef K. is produced as Becoming-political: leaving the intimacy of 'inner truth', Kafka becomes political in connecting the bureaucrat and the nomad, not choosing between them. Which concrete tactics to deploy in a given (political) struggle: the bureaucrats, the State apparatus or the nomad war machine, is an empirical, if not empiricist, question. The question of theory is connected to the development of the Royal Science of the State apparatus, theory being the one segment of the code produced by the binary machine of Royal Science: theory versus practice. The nomad war machine de-territorialises the striated space occupied by the Royal Sciences (be it the Metric system, the Law of gravity or their combination and compilation: the law of research funding) via a radical empiricism, in which interpretation gives way to description. The nomad war machine is not immune to Fascism, it is not a carte blanche, not an idealism nor an ideology and it is far from being a revolution. It is an alternative way of performing knowledge with no transcendence, no representation and no metaphysics. No theory, as there is no 'practice' different from it. It is a science of pure immanence. Kristine Miller (University of Minnesota) PUBLIC ART IN THE NEW TIMES SQUARE Critics of public art projects in the "New Times Square" have noted that rather than serving to question the politics of the massive urban renewal project, they have instead masked them. The "open" image of public art was used to hide economic and social structures that were exploitive, exclusionary and restrictive. Similarly, public art works proposed for Times Square that did call out the injustices of the redevelopment project never saw the light of day because the mechanisms for presenting public art (the massive signs so important to the aesthetic of the neighbourhood) are in private hands. This paper examines the conditions for the failure of public art in Times Square and argues that this failure is due to the fact that the entire district is not public at all. Ros Mills (Southern Cross University) This paper discusses the relationship of cultural studies to theory and politics through a discussion of citizenship, democracy, violence and the law. My texts are those concerning the recent release from custody of John Venables and Robert Thompson, the two eighteen year old boys who killed two year old James Bulger in Liverpool in February 1993. Some of the questions I wish to raise here are; what can be said about the relationships between law, democracy, retribution and justice - or between citizenship and notions of 'the child'? And, how might theory help us when the Law and the commonweal seem to be at odds with one another? I would like to unpick some of the complex issues raised here in the context of the theme of 'what's left of theory'. Andrew Milner (Monash University) CULTURAL MATERIALISM AND CULTURAL STUDIES This paper traces the significance of Marxism in the early development of Cultural Studies, stressing the role of the Frankfurt School, left Leavisism and Marxian versions of general semiology. It examines how this history is occluded in accounts centred on categories like 'culturalism' and 'structuralism'. Taking E.P. Thompson's account of the relation between historical logic and historical materialism as a template, it seeks to explore the continuing relevance to contemporary Cultural Studies of Marxism in general and of Raymond Williams's cultural materialism in particular. Alberto Moreiras, Duke University THE NON-SUBJECT OF THE POLITICAL: ON NEOPAULINISM. Neopaulinism offers itself as a form of posthegemonic thinking, anattempt at transcending the systemics of hegemony/counterhegemony as the ultimate horizon of the political. If globalization is the name for the waning of all structural antagonisms to the reality of the social as presently constituted (i.e., the tendentially full constitution of a subject of the social, without remainder, or without a remainder that is not immediately abjected as such, and becomes then not an enemy within the political field but rather the enemy of humanity, and therefore beyond politics), neopaulinism marks the will for a reinvention of the political through a new cathexis of the social: a change in the very coordinates of the real. This change in the real is purportedly no longer a hegemonic change, that is, a hegemonic rearticulation of the social, but rather its radicalization into revolutionary change. Paul becomes exemplar of a theoretical practice of the outside of hegemony, the embodiment of a revolutionary truth procedure, the event whose repetition might occasion a new cathexis or radical seizure of the social totality. But Paul is said to have operationalized his truth procedure through an intervention in the subject of the political: Paul changed the subject. Two questions then come up. The first question is: can a change in the subject of the political truly effect anything other than hegemonic change? The second: Are politics necessarily always and in every case a politics of the subject? I want to answer no to both question, and explain why. Stephen Muecke (University of Technology, Sydney) DEVASTATION This paper explores the semantics of the word 'devastation', taking it as a feeling, a metaphor of vastness and waste, and in poetics, an objective determinate‚ for a possible Australian modernism which would build out of the antiquities of indigenous space rather than the ruins of European cultures. Its contribution to understandings of culture pivot around the paradox of the strength of the weak, in particular, the cultural survival or re-emergence of that which appears to be rejected or defeated, Warwick Mules (Central Queensland University) CAN A PHOTOGRAPH TELL LIES? THEORY AND EVERYDAY OBJECTS Drawing on the writings of Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault, I argue that theory should not be seen as a separate domain of humanities and the social sciences involving propositional arguments and technical and theoretical debate. Rather theory should become something like a stance or attitude adopted when engaging with the things that are to be discussed, analysed or observed. In other words, theory should be that aspect of an analysis or critical project which responds to the questions posed when a subject meets an object. In this way, theoretical issues become immanent to the project, rather than standing outside them in a special domain. My discussion will be elaborated with an examination of some photographic images, responding to the questions they ask of me about time, space and seeing as a bodily disposition. Seeing becomes a theoretical stance or posture to the images, allowing thought to take flight. The advantage of this approach to theory is that it frees up critical analysis from taking an outside or oppositional position with respect to the objects it addresses, allowing it to enter more freely into the projects which have given rise to these objects. In this way, theory is more able to make a positive contribution to the ongoing efforts to know and understand contemporary processes, and hence be in a better position to change them. By orienting theory in this way, we may overcome some of the doubts and uncertainties about the place of theory in cultural studies today. The shift away from an oppositional and critical stance to a more positivist stance that has taken place over the last decade in the humanities, does not exonerate us from 'doing' theory. It simply means we need to do it in a different way. Llewellyn Negrin (University of Tasmania) ART AND PHILOSOPHY: RIVALS OR PARTNERS? Beginning with Nietzsche, an increasing chorus of voices have sought to assert the supremacy of art over philosophy and to liberate its sensuous aspects from the domination of the conceptual. In The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche lamented what he saw to be the usurpation of the creative spirit of art by the rise to prominence of rationalistic, Socratic logic. Echoing similar sentiments, a wide range of theorists including Walter Benjamin, Susan Sontag, Roland Barthes and Jean-Francois Lyotard have sought to rescue the sensuous immediacy of art from the arid abstractness of philosophical thought by advocating a more spontaneous, immediate and less rationalistic response to works of art. The concern of this paper will be to examine the validity of this challenge to philosophy's capacity to make sense of the experience of art. It will be argued that while art is irreducible to philosophy, at the same time, they are inextricably bound together. Thus, while philosophy cannot totally account for art, at the same time, art in the modern era cannot be experienced independently of philosophy. Indicative of this interdependence of art and philosophy has been a trend towards the increasing philosophization of art-a trend which has gathered strength despite the countermoves to assert the irreducibility of the visual to the conceptual. In an apparent fulfilment of Hegel's prophecy that art would be eclipsed by philosophy as the primary source of self-consciousness in the modern era, more and more artists today make works where visual/formal concerns are supplanted by philosophical questions concerning the definition of art itself, as Arthur Danto points out in After the End of Art. What follows from this is that while on the one hand, it is important to recognise that art is irreducibly distinct from philosophy, at the same time, it is equally necessary to realise that art cannot exist without philosophy. To assert the primacy of art over philosophy is just as problematic as to acquiesce with Hegel's thesis of the eclipse of art by philosophy. Brett Nicholls (University of Otago) SURVIVING THEORY: ENGAGING WITH CULTURE ON THE MOVE Recently cultural studies has been driven by a critical problematic that emphasizes pleasure, consumption, and the construction of hybrid identities. From this perspective media culture is understood as a site for constructing identities, pleasures, and empowerment. This means that audiences actively constitute culture through their consumption of media products. This problematic has been confidently attacked and dismissed as a cultural populism (Kellner, Gitlin among others) that disconnects cultural studies from political economy and critical social theory. In the context of increasing globalization, media conglomeration, and transformations within the flows of capital, cultural populism amounts to a theoretical impoverishment, lack of critical rigour, and an aversion to attempt to develop alternatives to hegemonic forms of culture. In this paper I question the confident terms of this charge against cultural studies. Embedded in the notion of cultural studies as vacuous populism is a desire for theoretical paradigms that have been associated with the historical avant-garde. Whilst there is clearly a much needed call to a more rigorous account of culture here, there is an understated and problematic legitimacy in theoretical modernism at work. The call to a more rigorous theoretical practice can easily become a call to a canon that demands to be respected. Is it possible, therefore, that this attack upon cultural studies can be read as a new theoretical correctness that ultimately defeats the purpose of conceptual work? The paper responds to this question by borrowing and developing an idea from Homi Bhabha: 'surviving theory'. I argue that theory is a creative practice that is both necessary and unavoidable. What is at stake in theory today is less a theoretical correctness, drawn up under the banner of the left, than a commitment to engaging with a culture that is constantly moving. The subject is faced with thinking problems that are always in flux, always escaping the conceptual grasp of the tools that are available for thinking. To survive theory is thus to grapple with the provisionality and the necessary mobility of concepts, to think strategically, to think on the move. This presentation will draw on media, theories of globalization and figurality to suggest that critical thinking, understood as a creative practice, is crucial for cultural analysis. Greg Noble (University of Western Sydney) ACCUMULATING BEING: EXISTENTIAL RICHNESS AND ONTOGENETIC DEPTH IN EVERYDAY LIFE Existing approaches to the question of subjectivity often are framed by a logic of domination, or by the self-expressive focus of identity politics. These are both relatively 'flat', one-dimensional conceptions of human existence. This paper, based on research into people's domestic possessions, appropriates the notion of ontological depth and aspects of Bourdieu's socioanalysis to argue that humans 'accumulate being' in their quest for ontological security. The paper develops notions of 'existential richness' and 'ontogenetic depth' to explore this accumulation of being and the dimensionality and continuity of everyday life, grounded in material objects and spaces. The project of ontological security enacted through this accumulation, however, secures relations of power by making them habitable. Jonathon Oake (University of Melbourne) TOO SMART FOR THEIR OWN GOOD: THE THEORIST AS CYNIC. Cynicism presents something of a quandary for what is usually taken as the 'Enlightenment' worldview, according to which, accumulation of knowledge leads to emancipation. With the phenomena of contemporary cynicism, it would appear that the opposite is occurring - increased popular expertise in understanding the mechanisms of power has not led to their overthrow at all, but has in fact coincided with their entrenchment. A case in point here would be the American people's relation to their President - it is openly acknowledged, in an almost embarrassingly public way, that George W. Bush is no towering intellect, and yet this has in no way undermined his attempts at governing, as one might expect it would. Philosophers such as Peter Sloterdijk and Slavoj Zizek have thus been led to conclude that cynicism, in an age of self-reflexivity, is the mode for mediating the subject's own relationship to ideological hegemony - or in other words, cynicism helps, rather than hinders the establishment of the Law. Using examples from popular culture, I will firstly make the argument that such a theory (drawing on Jacques Lacan) allows for a re-formulation of already-received versions of post-structuralism (Foucault, for instance). Finally, I will consider the extent to which the deadlock which occurs whenever contemporary theory meets political praxis can be understood along the lines of a theory of cynicism. Here, the contemporary theorist emerges as a cynical subject, whose relentless critical self-reflexivity leads to a paralysis of political action, as contrasted with the 'naïve' subject of Marxism, for instance. I will examine the paradoxes inherent in this position, whereby the post-structural critic is far too clever to assume any of the available political subjectivities. Wendy Pearson (University of Wollongong) ANIMAL ACTS: WHAT'S LEFT OF THE ARGUMENT FROM NATURE? When Bruce Bagemihl's Biological Exuberance: Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity was first published in 1999, it caused quite a stir in the scientific world. Bagemihl's exhaustive catalogue of the extraordinary diversity of sexual behaviours among animals is hard to dismiss, as is his survey of the overall unwillingness of researchers in the field either to publish their findings or to conclude, in the first place, that sexual behaviour amongst animals of the same biological sex is sex at all. Like President Clinton, many biologists have had some difficulty deciding what sex is, either in practice or in theory. If reticence towards evidence of animal "homosexuality" has been the keyword amongst biologists, the situation is often reversed when it comes to theories of sexuality. Nature is where we first turn to see a reflection of ourselves, either for or against -- and sometimes both at once. Kant, for example, argued that sexual desire "exposes mankind to the danger of equality with the beasts" (Lectures on Ethics 164), while at the same time dismissing homosexuality as "crimina carnis contra naturam" (crimes of the flesh which are against nature) which "degrade human nature to a level below that of animal nature and make a human being unworthy of his humanity" (170). Kant's belief that animals are innately and by nature heterosexual is one that is still widely held in western cultures, yet as the evidence gathered by Bagemihl and researchers like him disperses beyond the narrow confines of the scientific community, the unquestioning recourse to the heterosexuality of nature, a recourse which, like all invocations of the natural, is always already problematic within the terms of Cultural Studies itself, is liable to be slowly eroded. In "'Unnatural Acts' in Nature: The Scientific Fascination with Queer Animals," Jennifer Terry identifies changes in the way in which researchers apply the term "homosexual" (such as the shift in whether "mountee" or "mounter" is ascribed a homosexual identity) and notes that those changes coincide with wider cultural attitudes towards gayness. Terry concludes that humans will always use "nature" as a source for narratives about human sexuality. That being the case, this paper will investigate contemporary intersections, both popular and theoretical, between animal sexuality and human sexuality, particularly in the light of Bagemihl's book and the response to it by sociobiology. What remains of the argument from nature in other discourses of sexuality, especially those circulating within popular culture, politics and the public sphere? Chris Prentice (University of Otago) CULTURAL DIFFERENCE: A SIMULATED POLITICS OR A POLITICS OF SIMULATION? A commentator on the 2001 British elections suggested that 'left' and 'right' have lost their political force now that government has become managerial. Analogously, Bill Readings argued in The University in Ruins (1996) that the modern 'university of culture' has become the posthistorical 'university of excellence', modelled on the transnational corporation. Just as 'excellence', like 'value', has no actual content or referent, but is both empty and mobile, 'culture' itself in this context becomes dereferentialised. Readings posits this as a precondition for the rise of cultural studies-in a form which invokes what Simon During referred to as the 1990s 'cultural turn' in the humanities and social sciences-where culture may include anything and everything, and is its own object(s), context, and horizon of study. This paper draws together these observations with what During calls 'engaged' cultural studies' own account of its affirmation of the specific and the local, the limited and the situated, as against political and theoretical assimilations and universalisms, to investigate the possibilities for a politics of cultural difference. I focus on ways in which discourses of bi- and multiculturalism negotiate a context where 'culture' and 'difference' are consistent both with local resistances to totalising forces, as well as with global managerialism and the market-place. The implosion of political poles that renders 'left' and 'right' inadequate terms through which to understand the stakes of cultural difference, presents theoretical challenges both to cultural studies and which cultural studies is especially well positioned to address. Guy Redden (University of Queensland) NEW AGE THEORY: A CRITIQUE AND A PLEA Post-60s theory is often seen as involving a 'linguistic turn' in humanities research. This turn vexed the categories of reference and truth (deconstruction) and encouraged analysis of the cultural contingencies of signification (structuralism, new historicism). One of the central political foci of the movement was to reread the history of ideas in order to critique the epistemological foundations which had privileged the universalist claims of those who could master 'rational' language. Instead, the aim of cultural analysis became to highlight the relationships between knowledge and power. Culture has subsequently been approached through the medium of discourse, with cultural critique being seen as a form of political intervention. My research into the New Age movement is dependent upon the linguistic turn. The main methodologies are textual analysis and discursive genealogy. Rather than attempting to explain it in the received church-sect typologies of sociology of religion, I view the New Age as a loose community that negotiates (challenges and reproduces) discourses relevant to the lifeworlds of participants. In other words, New Age texts and practices are themselves engaged in processes of cultural politics. This paper argues that such New Age cultural politics problematises any etic/emic distinction, forcing the critic to see the object of critical inquiry as also being a site of the production of reflexive critique. New Ageism, in the terms of Thomas McLaughlin, is a form of 'vernacular' theory. Just like much academic theory, it recognises the mediation of the self by modern technocratic knowledge. It similarly traces the problem back to modern epistemology, positing that modern rationalism disempowers individuals' ability to achieve personal knowledge and make decisions. The New Age has emerged in the same historical period as post-structuralist theory. Both can be seen as extensions of the 1960s counterculture that revolve around critical interventions into Western knowledge. Yet where theory took its linguistic turn, it seems that the New Age proposed an 'inward turn'. It commonly proposes that individuals can intuitively tap inner wisdom as a basis for making life decisions that would otherwise be made by oppressive institutional powers or on the basis of the norms they create. It promises to restore the self as an agent capable of determining its own destiny. On this point, it diverges from the main thrust of academic theory, as the latter tends to view subjectivity as an effect of discourse. As Andrew Ross argues, the patrician left tends to reject New Ageism as a form of narcissism without considering its criticality. In contrast, this paper argues that it offers a theory of agency that is apposite to the everyday dilemmas of choosing one's destiny in a detraditionalized social milieu. This also suggests that academic theory's notion of determination of the subject through discourse may have limited usefulness as a foundation for personal action outside academic settings, as it cannot point to a source for personal change other than the operations of 'discourse' itself. I find myself caught between two positions-New Age volanturism and the decentred subjectivity of post-structuralist theory-wondering if there is not 'something to be said' for both models. William D Routt (unaffiliated) LEFT STILL DANCING These words are, of course, the outline of a tentative answer to the question posed by the topic of this conference. My paper will offer some unfinished consideration of the words, both separately and in combination. (There will be no physical demonstrations). Behind the words lies a problem for writing about (popular) art. For me the problem is, broadly speaking, movement. What would it be to write adequately about something moving? In these circumstances I find myself not leaving, but missing, theory. Horst Ruthrof (Murdoch University) THEORIZING: AN INCOMPLETE PROJECT After a brief period of theoretical inquiry in the Humanities during the second half of the last century, a number of antitheoretical positions have (re)surfaced: a revival of the 'two cultures' argument; a body of literature under the general heading 'Against Theory'; the theoretical impoverishment in Cultural Studies; a theory scepticism in the wake of Derrida's 'violent hierarchies' argument; the waging of a war on 'totalisation' as formulated by Lyotard; and the impossibility of critique as a result of Baudrillard's world of simulacra. The paper argues that if ever there was a need for theorizing it is now in the age of digital transformation and managerial control systems. And if ever the claim made by Deleuze/Guattari that the task of philosophy was to create new concepts was persuasive it is now at a time when postmodern, indifferent differentiation offers itself as a basis for culture. The tasks for theorisation and critique are piling up: the incremental absorption of the linguistic sign by mere signifiers; syntactic conceptions of semiosis both in structuralism and its successors; definitional approaches to natural language and culture; the performative paradox of Lyotard's hostility to large-scale explanatory schemes; Lacan's heritage of floating signifiers; Hayle's 'flickering signifier'; telos bashing and the confusion of Aristotelian and Kantian telos; the reduction of the differentiation of reasoning to instrumental reason; mindless Enlightenment bashing, when much of what is being argued is precisely the heritage of the Enlightenment; the confusion of indeterminacy with underdetermination; the relation between verbal and nonverbal signification; the tension between Deleuze's formal description of meaning and his later philosophy; or the paradox of political claims made on the basis of the impossibility of 'meaning'. The paper concludes with a summary argument for the inevitability of theorising as an essential aspect of critical creative energy. Katrina Schlunke PERFORMING THEORY AND THE POST-POLITICAL WHITE BOY What about the second order of theory where one is not actually a theorist but instead 'does' theory? Regardless of whether the theorist who was being taken up was of the right or left, the performance of theory was (is?) usually a masculinist one and invariably conservative. In the small worlds of theory performance right and left had little meaning but feminism, queer, ethnic and indigenous did. The concerns of this conference seem caught between an old imagining of theory as left or right and the more recently imagined pleasures of theory as contamination, as unpredictable and as unanticipated evocations. Is there nothing more political than post-political theory but we do we recognise it as such? Matthew Sharpe (University of Melbourne) WHAT LEFT IN ZIZEK? This paper's content turns around the double register of the signifier 'Left' in its title. Firstly, I look at how Zizek situates himself, and ought to be situated, in the history of the intellectual Left. The difficulty of easily placing him are obvious. Like the 'Western Marxists' (Lukacs and the Frankfurt School), Zizek's intervention seems primarily located at the level of the politics of culture. Likewise, even his primary critical intellectual debt is to Hegel. Yet Zizek's Hegelianism does not turn around a 'humanistic' reclaiming of Marx. His own avowed primary Marxist source is Louis Althusser, whose antihumanism, and anti-Hegelianism, is notorious. The second question the paper poses is: after Zizek has plied his critical wares, what is it that he leaves as a viable normative and political alternative to the current all-pervasive neoliberal hergemony? Particularly, I shall be interested to see how Zizek's work can be placed vis-a-vis the dynamic antinomy of freedom-necessity that Andrew Arato, for example, has suggested can be read as plaguing critical Marxism since Lukacs. Does Zizek lead us, via his impressive Lacanian critical apparatus, only into the cul de sac of a Leninist voluntarism? Or do his more recent forays into Christianity, for example, indicate the possibility of a more robust politics, grounded on a revamped post-Kantia