Finishing the piece the other week, I had the great fortune to read Kane Race’s Pleasure Consuming Medicine, which will definitely be adding to our revised version. Kane’s fascinating and inspiring book is full of ideas, and I want to share just a couple of them here.

The clear resonance with the story of Underbelly, in its scripted and real life forms, is the centrality of drugs. In each case, to borrow Kane’s words, “drugs are fit for incorporation within an amoral consumer logic, as commodities par excellence” (11).

Kane suggests that “one way to grasp the responsibility of drugs” is to “consider them as necessarily re-creational. When all drugs are cast on the plane of re-creation, the agonistic nature of pharmaceutical production and consumption becomes explicit: we expose what is specific, partial, and consequential about our biochemical techniques of the self” (9).

Among Kane’s wider arguments is the claim that: “At the moment that consumption becomes the normative mode of social participation and citizenship, medical authority becomes available in these discourses to fulfil the role of the moral curb on the self-administering consumer. As a result, these discourses become especially prone to political and authoritarian investment—precisely because they produce the self as the moral locus of consumption” (15).

The book provides a series of case studies to show how this plays out, whether at the local level in Sydney or through transnational media texts and health disciplines.

Kane also highlights the experiences of queer communities touched by HIV/AIDS, and how this context continues to affect drug consumption in the present. One point of this is to trouble the legal distinctions and moralising judgements that adhere to some kinds of drug consumption, and therefore some populations, more than others. But an even more forceful dimension of this project is the way that it reveals drug consumption to be symptomatic of a culture that fails to recognise or advance enough models to express desire, intimacy, care and community (see especially the final chapter, “Exceptional Sex: How drugs have come to mediate sex in gay discourse”).

Of the many poetic and powerful passages, the section describing ‘the auratic value of queer dance parties’ is among my favourite. Drawing on Walter Benjamin’s essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”, Kane shows how ecstasy use and the mass dance party event, set against the backdrop of the AIDS crisis, produced a set of singular experiences that lost their poignant “aura” with the commercialisation of queer lifestyles, and – as our Underbelly paper describes – the mainstreaming of club culture and ecstasy consumption. Linking this to the fortunes of Sydney’s Mardi Gras, Kane notes that: “If the large-scale queer dance party is a form in decline, this is not simply because it bcame more commercial, but because one of the primary conditions within which it came to accrue meaning and value has altered – and thankfully so” (29).

This is the bit that stuck:

What if we were to understand the dance party not as the transparent radiation of community, but as a mediated event through which a sense of community was hallucinated? The massed bodies, decorations, lights, drugs, costumes, and music combined to produce a powerful and widely accessed perception of presence, belonging, shared circumstance, and vitality at a time when the image of the gay man, dying alone, ostracized from family, was the publicly proffered alternative. To describe this experince as hallucination is not to say that it was false or untrue, for this would be to imply, incorrectly, that there is some pure, unmediated reality which it is possible to access transparently. I want to take seriously the importance of pleasure, imagination, and fantasy in the construction of new materialities. This sense of community that was animated at dance parties was real with real effects. It was realized in the affirmative apprehension of thousands of bodies presumed affected in similar ways by the accidents of history and the exclusions of heterosexual society. It was worked out in the minutiae of caring practices, the forging of dependable relations outside the family form, the inventive expression of memory and grief, the commitment to a safe-sex ethic. It was tapped into by agencies seeking to advance the public rights of gay men, lesbians, and people with HIV/AIDS, as well as to deliver health programming and to conduct research. It helped sustain a collective sense of predicament, power, care, and commitment – a shared ethos enabling wide-ranging cooperation and transformative activity. (22)

The true power of any great work of queer theory is that its insights advance our understanding of the culture at large, not merely the agendas of those seeking respite from the categories of gender or sexual identity currently favoured. Kane’s work sits among that precious group of writers and thinkers who translate experience in such a way that our ideas and hopes for another world are energised to take shape sooner. I hope a lot of people read this book!

Some of you would have heard the interview I did on Radio National yesterday about Facebook in the workplace, which drew on the material mentioned here a few weeks ago. Thanks to Mark and Legal Eagle for the background that helped get some of that message across.

Next week I’m presenting some research from the Working From Home study at the AMSRS conference in Sydney. This will be a sketch of the pros and cons of working from home for those in industry. It will particularly focus on how this trend affects women more than men – and from my understanding this is why it will be topical for a fairly feminised industry like market research.

The general argument is that women like working from home because office cultures haven’t changed enough to be welcoming, in spite of the new rhetoric of “flexibility” and “diversity” in the workplace. In addition, if companies are seeing “home-shoring” as comparable to “off-shoring” in the drive to cut infrastructure expenses, they should be aware of the amount of hidden labour that goes on once work leaves the office. Surveillance technologies may be able to tell when workers log on and log off, but are they likely to care if women work longer hours than they should?

This talk is based on a chapter from my book, Work’s Intimacy, which I’m very happy to say has been contracted to Polity Press. Obviously there is a longer story to tell about this decision, given the public statements I’ve made about the need for domestic publishing industry support for young scholars. But for now I’m focusing on getting the rest of the manuscript done, motivated by some very encouraging readers’ reports.

Thursday I’m also heading to Melbourne for a fun event at ACMI, where I will be interviewing Andrew Rule about Underbelly. I have some door passes if you’re in Melbourne and would like to come. I am very excited about this! And have really enjoyed preparing for it.

Things feel good work-wise at the moment. I think the move to Sydney is definitely giving the research I’ve been doing a bit more traction than it might have. But in a much more significant way I’m really enjoying having some company during the long hours at the office. The department at Sydney seems uniquely blessed at the moment with with lots of young scholars who are all working on amazing things. Fiona Allon recently won a Future Fellowship to work in the department on her project “The Wealth Effect: A cultural analysis of prosperity, financialisation and everyday life in contemporary Australia”. So great to see a cultural studies project on such an important topic getting support from the ARC. Tonight we are celebrating Anna Hickey-Moody’s book launch for Unimaginable Bodies, just a couple of weeks after Kane Race’s launch of Pleasure Consuming Medicine.

It’s a joy to be sharing the corridor with colleagues doing such important work – and who also know how to party!

Social networks register a ‘refusal of work’. But our net-time, after all, is another kind of labour. Herein lies the perversity of social networks: however radical they may be, they will always be data-mined. They are designed to be exploited. Refusal of work becomes just another form of making a buck that you never see.

And this:

Tag, Connect, Friend, Link, Share, Tweet. These are not terms that signal any form of collective intelligence, creativity or networked socialism. They are directives from the Central Software Committee. «Participation» in «social networks» will no longer work, if it ever did, as the magic recipe to transform tired and boring individuals into cool members of the mythological Collective Intelligence. If you’re not an interesting individual, your participation is not really interesting. Data clouds, after all, are clouds: they fade away. Better social networks are organized networks involving better individuals – it’s your responsibility, it’s your time. What is needed is an invention of social network software where everybody is a concept designer. Let’s kill the click and unleash a thousand million tiny tinkerers!

I’m looking for more provocative readings like this for my course on Intimacy, Love and Friendship next semester. This course was previously taught using classic readings in philosophy, but I’ve decided there’s little point me trying to replicate that version. Instead, I’ll be encouraging students to reflect on the ways intimacy, love and friendship are enabled and performed in media they use – particularly online media.

This the first course I’ll be teaching with my own content, so I’m slightly more excited than daunted at the moment. My aim is to create a cultural studies course that is sensitive to gender normativity and that makes use of online material as much as offline – any suggestions towards this end would be very welcome.

Of course I’ll post the outline here when it’s ready.

Grizzling about FB
• part of a wider trend in media commentary where old media narrate the arrival and adoption of the new
• there is a shared concern in academic and media commentary around intimacy norming: particularly, an attachment to being able to control what a friend is

Grizzling
• Macquarie dictionary: “fretful complaint”
• a genre of popular social criticism
• to complain about something but to do so repeatedly, to go on and on
• makes the listener tired of hearing about it
• not whining or whinging; these are different charges
• contains a judgment
• grizzling isn’t weak, it’s irritating and therefore more powerful
• grizzling is Western
• Australian talkback radio: grizzling “at length”

FB’s appeal (social elites’ experience of FB)
• its combinatory force, multiple potentials
• a habitat, a lived environment
• ambient awareness
• temporal accumulation → depth

The problem with New Facebook: Removed FB applications from frontpage – removed memories. Moved it away from being a non-elite (scrapbook) form. Prior to this it had similarities with “an Irish house” full of “dust catchers”: where everything is kept because it has significance. There is a force to the objects accumulated, the debris of people’s lives (we have learned to think this is important for indigenous cultures but are less willing to see it in Western contexts)

Now the economy/desire for “an uncluttered page” is both corporate and American (the emphasis on “how I’m feeling”)

FB now much more like a big conglomerate – allows us to make history but in conditions not of our making.

Still, it can help users (social elites) understand their relationship to others and their place in a managerial class/community… This makes sense given where professional work is headed…. i.e. institutional oppression works by entering your head and making you feel terrible… FB is a (utopian?) positive space that alleviates some of the psychic/emotional abrasion of working in information labour (as if this is somehow less damaging than manual labour).

FB emerges at a moment when time is experienced as the medium of pressure, particularly for young people

Erskineville Road, Sydney, November 7

Ordinary Australians? Aspiration, commodity fetishism and masculinity in Underbelly

While Channel 9’s Underbelly has several obvious points of interest for TV scholars – its legal travails, its status as “post-broadcast” television and its connection with the “True Crime” genre among others – this paper finds it to be most profitably read as a counter-narrative to the dominant renderings of Australia’s social and cultural history through the 1990s and early 2000s. First, in its connection of the criminal violence of its protagonists with suburban material aspiration, and its presentation of its narrative events as alternatively continuous with and dangerous to Australian suburban life. Second, in its revelation of the brutal economies of drug production and distribution which underwrote ecstasy consumption in the golden age of Australian club culture. Third, in its capacity to offer a retrospective genealogy for the spectacular, drug-inflected, criminalised hypermasculinity which is now – in the bodies and behaviours of professional sports stars in particular – a visible part of the Australian mainstream.

By putting the vocabulary of aspiration in the mouths of criminals, and by situating them in the suburbs, Underbelly suggests that ruthless, murderous competition may not be incompatible with the Australian Dream. Exposing a generation’s denial of the criminal economy behind ecstasy’s fetishised status, it problematises celebratory accounts of club culture, and suggests dark externalities for the “night-time economy” of our inner cities. As well as connecting country, suburb and city in repressed criminality – by virtue of its casting choices at the very least – the series blurs the lines between ordinariness, celebrity and infamy. It is in these unresolved tensions that Underbelly constitutes a televisual history of Australia’s present that countervails the official pieties of the “ordinary” that characterised the Howard years.

We’re keen to hear from anyone with comments or responses to these ideas at this stage, because the conference will be a fairly closed audience. I also think we’ve been scheduled on with two papers about Deadwood, so I’m not sure if our listeners will have much in common. I guess this is ironic given that we think Underbelly has a lot to teach media and cultural studies scholars about their preferred objects of inquiry in Australia in recent years. But it will take a book for us to say that.

I’m now off to search for some t-shirts to wear at the conference.

There could be the potential for a podcast of the event given the close relationship I developed with a roving mike but in saying that I would be more than happy if my dinner hypothesis was proven and no-one bothered to download it. In any case the “under construction” theme was thoroughly fitting my home cooked theories about work on television (theories that reached a crescendo during the Emmys coverage) and I remain very grateful for all the ideas, DVDs and even spoilers shared afterwards.

Despite some strong desires to enjoy the beautiful Melbourne surroundings and also my first ever Grand Final Parade I escaped early in the morning to beat the road closures and get to my interview at Sydney…

NOW.

(excitement)

The official news arising from that very nervous afternoon is that I have accepted a position as Lecturer in my old department, Gender and Cultural Studies, commencing mid-2009. Before that I will be finishing my Working From Home project based at Sydney too. This is very good news. Not only is the GCS program booming – enrolments and staff numbers have grown significantly since I was a grad student there – I’ll be inheriting some of the most interesting courses I could possibly hope for. e.g., my first assignment will be Intimacy, Love and Friendship in second semester next year. It means I can pursue my two ongoing research interests while also having access to a range of teaching opportunities – from foundational, introductory subjects to theory and methodology units as well as postgraduate coursework and supervision.

Five years of research work has been an incredible opportunity and privilege, but it has also been difficult to work so many years in my own head and without clear frameworks to contribute to institutional regeneration. I really want more diversity in my job, to be able to teach and learn from students and feel part of an ongoing project that has a collective outcome. The individualisation of workload and anxiety in research-only positions has also burrowed away at the expense of my personal life for some time now and it’s time to change that while I still can.

Some issues in particular are not incidental in making secure employment increasingly attractive. So, I am happy but also humble to have had the cards fall in my favour this time. I intend to make the most of this.

Of course such a profound change calls for some renovations on-blog as well! Hopefully you’ll stay tuned for some aesthetic developments which will reflect the more profound movements in the life of this “Brisbane research fella.” Here I don’t mean to invite jokes about the suit I wore to the policy forum on Monday (although it was great to have an event to dress up for). Rather, HCT will be having a redesign in the next week or two. For one thing, it needs to start saying “thirty something” rather than “twenty something”…

The paper provides an old school semiotic analysis of recent ICT advertising promoting ‘working from home’ and ‘flexible work’ to set the scene for two wider observations. Firstly, the mainstream media’s role in normalising preferred uses of new media technology for work purposes. (This argument actually pre-dates its earlier appearance in my article from last year, ‘Freedom to Work: The impact of wireless on labour politics’ – part of the special issue on ‘wireless cultures’ in Media International Australia). Secondly, how this process contributes to wider discourses limiting the aspirations of middle-class feminist politics to an individual level (the neoliberal mandate of ‘personal choice’). In conclusion, the paper seeks to question the ethical horizon of new media advertising as well as the feminist and labour politics upon which its appeal relies.

The individual horizon for labour politics in information jobs is a theme I’ll be developing in my talk next week, so seeing this is a nice reminder that I’m not straying too far from the original motivations for my research. But meanwhile if you’d like a copy of the paper and don’t have access, I can help out

Also, a while ago I mentioned a great article on the research assessment culture currently affecting the Anglophone academy. It’s by Guy Redden and it’s just come out in the 10th anniversary issue of M/C. M/C is a journal that has not only pioneered online publishing in tough conditions but in the process introduced and disseminated the work of many local friends who would have been waiting years for academic publications and an audience otherwise. Peta Mitchell’s article in the issue gives an insider’s account of the changing terrain for scholarly publishing over the period of M/C’s life, while David Marshall writes about the journal’s origins in a UQ Honours course.

Congratulations to Peta and David Marshall, and all those involved. Especially, it must be said, on the occasion of the anniversary, Axel Bruns: a driving force and consummate professional without whose formidable work ethic the journal may not have made it this far. I’m sure all of us who have published in M/C wish many more years of its success.

Some people will have seen that one of UQ’s most respected television scholars made the editorial of Brisbane’s Courier Mail on Friday, after giving an address to The Sopranos conference at Fordham University this past fortnight. Terry Flew has a fitting response to the story here. This kind of thing is par for the course in cultural studies, and if conference attendance is now gaining the same scrutiny as ARC funding in the tabloid press, I should probably prepare myself for Melbourne in November where I’ll be presenting a co-authored paper called “Ordinary Australians? Aspiration, commodity fetishism and masculinity in Underbelly”. I can only hope for the same amount of column space Jason’s work received.

But coming on top of Jill Walker’s effusive synopsis of this talk by Clay Shirky, I’m starting to wonder how many other people believe the claim that watching television has been the ‘collective bender’ of the 20th century; that we are only now just starting to wake up to the vast cognitive surplus that television (and previously gin) consumption has ‘masked’. According to Shirky, who laments the many hours he spent watching Gilligan’s Island as a kid, television sitcoms have been the social lubricant of the past century, ‘without which the wheels would’ve come off the whole enterprise’. He finds it regrettable that ‘every half-hour that I watched that was a half an hour I wasn’t posting at my blog or editing Wikipedia or contributing to a mailing list’. He also argues shows like ‘Desperate Housewives essentially functioned as a kind of cognitive heat sink, dissipating thinking that might otherwise have built up and caused society to overheat’.

I don’t even know how to engage with this last statement, but as I wrote in response to Jill’s post, it seems incredible to me that this kind of rhetoric is necessary to say why Web 2.0 is new or different or important. The argument that ‘it’s better to do something than to do nothing’ is spurious and lacks all context; nor does it reflect what we already know about the ways people use and manipulate and engage with broadcast media. Previous mass communication theories may well have characterised television as a one-to-many platform–what others might choose to describe as a ’sit back’ versus a ‘lean forward’ medium. But even these approaches overlook the realities of domestic media consumption revealed over decades of cultural studies: how it is so often a background companion to the routines of household labour, when it isn’t an excuse for many subtle and explicit forms of relationship building, or a closely observed entertainment platform with its own rituals and rewards for interaction.

Shirky’s argument does a disservice to those involved in developing and improving genuinely useful online endeavours by pitching their efforts against the platforms available to creative people in previous generations. He also pretends there hasn’t been an evolving sophistication in television production and consumption. Shows like The Simpsons have demonstrated this for many commentators in the past, but Ugly Betty, My Name is Earl, 30 Rock and Extras do the same for audiences today.

Relating the leisure pursuits of a small minority of educated and highly networked early adopters to the prospect of far broader social empowerment seems to imply that being able to make a lolcat is a step towards taking control back from the structural constraints of everyday life (ever tried explaining a lolcat to someone who doesn’t read blogs? i.e., still the majority of people? It will give you a sense of the significance of these ‘typical’ examples of online literacy). The notion of ‘cognitive surplus’ in leisure time actually risks taking capitalism’s productivity and efficiency imperatives to new extremes, part of the pernicious influence of the Getting Things Done industry as it enters the private sphere. But the complicity of Web 2.0 celebrities with capitalist logic is worth a book rather than a blogpost.

Perhaps the thing that remains inconvenient for the current bunch of web prophets is that unlike internet access and participation, television is cheap. Poor people can watch it, and those that do so regularly ‘consume’ television in ways that are as sophisticated and as knowledgeable as people who currently hold the cultural and educational power to manipulate present forms of media production and performance.

I bet that if you asked those who aren’t online regularly what their idea of ‘participation’ meant it would incorporate their work, their friendships, the support they offer their families and maybe also the sporting team they play in or follow. In short, banal civic activities within a recognisable public sphere that television also serves. To them, using the internet to make the most of their time after all those commitments have been met might well be a bizarre notion.

Shirky points to an optimistic future. He cites the wisdom of a four year old who is habituated to having a mouse attached to her screen as evidence for the naturalness of interactivity. His inspirational conclusion is that:

We are going to look at every place that a reader or a listener or a viewer or a user has been locked out, has been served up passive or a fixed or a canned experience, and ask ourselves, “If we carve out a little bit of the cognitive surplus and deploy it here, could we make a good thing happen?”

Like the DIY ethos of other prominent bloggers, this kind of language troubles me, and I’m not sure how best to argue with it. So for the moment I’ll just focus on that the same little girl Shirky refers to. I hope that despite the seductiveness of new media, she will also be allowed to indulge in the most time-wasting and apparently passive of all communication platforms, the novel. I hope that she may grow up to recognise the echoes of Steinbeck deployed in the passage above. I hope that knowledge allows her to contemplate how America’s subsequent affluence has been distributed unevenly. And I hope that she will be able to discern the unique brands of spin that currently feed new and old media alike, regardless of the screen she’s using.

Bruny is changing: it is no longer the modest, remote, embarrassing place of my childhood, where my city friends were too scared to come visit because it was so far away. Now it’s the place where rich people come to “get away from it all”, take wildlife cruises to be awe-struck by nature and generally fantasise about another, simpler life. Weird parts of my past and present life collide here. My friends are currently staying in the cabin my Dad built with two other blokes on the beach at Cloudy Bay and that Peter Beattie rented just before he left for the US. I’m trying to prepare for a seminar on “rural cultural studies” but the seminar papers that have been sent out in preparation are blowing out the broadband. My cousin who met me when I flew in last week is renovating her house to let Bob Brown use it as his city office (he is the partner of another cousin). Meanwhile I just found out my godfather has been working as a consultant to the Exclusive Brethren on its school curriculum.

I’ve been having a lot of nightmares since I got here. I wonder if it’s to do with the confusion my body feels in this acutely familiar place that is also so far from many other things and people I now love and call home. At night, the different lives it seems I’ve lived since leaving this place fight one another, vying for supremacy, trying to trick me into looking backwards at all the wrong moves I might still be able to correct. But in the daylight, I discover other things that reassure me I’ve been following the right path.

Like in the room where I’m sleeping, I’ve been remembering some of the first “books” I wrote in primary school:

Initially with the help of teachers, like this one:

these stories chart the years I spent trying to fit in at the private school I was sent to in the city. Their increasingly cloying dedications “to Jenna, Kate and Jacki who I like” and insular subject matter “Angela’s Rock and Roll Party” (which was, as far as I can recall, more fact than fiction) actually show how much my imagination and appetite for excitement narrowed in four years.

I went from blissful operatic Freudian fantasies (falling into a lake that I found in a cave!?!) to quite desperate attempts to make friends and fit in with the cool group.

That I thought I could do this through writing helps explain why so many of those friendships did not last in the process of my becoming a writer by profession; but the positive feedback I got from writing also explains why I persisted with it.

These comment sections sections at the back of the books are an early indication of why the post/response of blogging would be such a revelation to me, years later. The internet promises the ultimate (infinite) audience for feedback, even if the forms of reciprocity and encouragement also often fall into pre-established friendship groups – when they manage to rise above schoolyard antics. It was all a lot simpler though when someone I kind of knew just signed with the comment: 11/10.

It’s funny to find these little relics given what else I’ve been reading. Despite my brother’s warnings, I just finished Blind Faith, Ben Elton’s take on the micro-celebrity of reality television and – I guess – Web 2.0. It imagines a world where blogging and uploading video of all major life events and daily activities (including sex and childbirth) are compulsory acts of citizenship.

The quite credible depiction of office life in the near future certainly raises the stakes on my own reading of workplace affect that I finished before going away. It’s also an important book to read as Catherine and I try to strike a balance between advocacy, defensiveness and participant observation of online cultures. I don’t think we could ever be accused of the evangelism I’ve seen displayed by some of the bigger name bloggers and web enthusiasts, which might actually contribute to the book’s vision being realised, but even our position would be open to the thrust of Elton’s satire. What will save us from his dystopianism, as the exodus from Facebook is showing, is the persistence of certain bourgeois notions of privacy, as well as the consistently limited numbers of people who share the desire to write.

In Courage, another book I just finished, Maria Tumarkin claims she was thirty before she could ‘really, genuinely’ think of herself as a writer. Until then she had various strategies to avoid such a realisation, including convincing herself ‘that I had never wanted to be a writer in the first place’, and relegating writing ‘to the status of a verb, to turn it into one of the many actions I was given to performing from time to time’ (p. 150).

Tumarkin says it was fear that led her to dissociate herself from writing: ‘of being a talentless hack, a pen pusher, one of those people whose profound lack of talent is matched only by the blind conviction that they have something vitally important to say’ (p. 151). Overcoming that fear involved seeing writing as ‘a noun again, to recognise it as part of my inner-most identity… It was simply the need to write, which was akin to a compulsion, and which was not so much the sense of rightness [others] had described but rather a sense of must-ness’ (p. 151).

This is a deeply attractive description of writing, even though being a writer is something I still struggle to identify with. Maybe it’s because I haven’t quite turned 30! Or maybe it’s because of my own fears – RSI, blindness, Alzheimers, cancer – that are all Western and bourgeois too, and which I suspect Maria would hate. More rationally, I am quite determined not to follow a lineage of people who have used the label of ‘writer’ as a convenient alibi, to excuse me from all of the things I might otherwise be tempted to use it to avoid: reciprocal relationships, family obligations, community involvement, political activism, general politeness, cooking dinner for my partner or putting the garbage out. These are all things I want to be able to maintain as well as being a writer, and yet romantic visions of it as courageous or radical make me shy and pessimistic that might be possible.

In two days I will have to leave the views of the lagoon and the veggie patch which grows strawberries and raspberries every day to face smoggy Sydney again. But at least on Saturday I will be home to my beautiful boy, more post-rock at The Tivoli, some expanded wardrobe choices and the challenge of keeping many conflicting desires and histories in happy animation.