There’s a strange forgetfulness around the term fictocriticism as it’s used in Australia now - for fictocriticism made its appearance here in the writing (mostly non-academic) of women very well aware of those strange, exciting and... more
There’s a strange forgetfulness around the term fictocriticism as it’s used in Australia now - for fictocriticism made its appearance here in the writing (mostly non-academic) of women very well aware of those strange, exciting and provocative texts emanating first of all from France and then later from Canada from the late seventies onward - most influential were Helene Cixous’ manifesto ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’ and her polemical essay ‘Castration or Decapitation’, Luce Irigaray’s first two books and in particular the collection of essays This Sex Which Is Not One. In Australia, an awareness of this writing was manifest soon after in the work of a number of writers in Frictions, published by Sybylla Press in 1982 & edited by myself & Alison Tilson - one of the first collections of Australian women’s (fiction) writing edited from a feminist perspective (and still trying to figure out exactly what that meant). I would cite in this context the contributions of Sneja Gunew, Wendy Morg...
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I want to begin by suggesting that fictocriticism is a ‘haunted writing’: traced by numerous voices which work now in unison, at other times in counterpoint, and at others still against each other, in deliberate discord. The problem of... more
I want to begin by suggesting that fictocriticism is a ‘haunted writing’: traced by numerous voices which work now in unison, at other times in counterpoint, and at others still against each other, in deliberate discord. The problem of haunted writing comes to the fore in academic discourse when disciplinary authority and discursive protocol function as the voice of the dead stalking the present so as to paralyse it with terror, or else as a kind of watchful superego as resistant to modification as if it were a text inscribed in stone. In an act of defiance, an attempt to exorcise the paralysing interdictions of disciplinary academic authority, feminist writers in particular have sought other relationships to such forms of authority than those of simple submission and unthinking repetition.
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This paper argues that writing programs need to consider forging more active alliance with the visual arts, on the grounds that the digital revolution is beginning to bring about changes that will see writers and artists (and technicians... more
This paper argues that writing programs need to consider forging more active alliance with the visual arts, on the grounds that the digital revolution is beginning to bring about changes that will see writers and artists (and technicians of different kinds) working together in collaboration more frequently than at present, and that new practices in creative research mean that we may have more in common with the visual arts than with other, traditional, disciplines when it comes to arguing politically for the value of what we do. This case is made by examining in detail selected instances of the work being written on ‘complex surfaces’ (Cayley 2005), new kinds of work being made with code, and the reconvergence of text with the visual in new media work.
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In Munster’s and Barker’s new work, HokusPokus, a robotic environment comes alive when we make our entrance, transforming darkened space into responsive place enabling exploration of the relationship between our attention and what we see... more
In Munster’s and Barker’s new work, HokusPokus, a robotic environment comes alive when we make our entrance, transforming darkened space into responsive place enabling exploration of the relationship between our attention and what we see or what we miss via engagement with the entrancing performances of a consummate stage magician. He performs his magic, but it is we who are staged so that in observing ourselves we might discover something about both what it is and why it is we fail to see.
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This essay describes the phenomenon of panic from both neurological and affective points of view. It draws on the work of Japp Panksepp, who argues for the importance of distinguishing between fear as a response to physical threat, and... more
This essay describes the phenomenon of panic from both neurological and affective points of view. It draws on the work of Japp Panksepp, who argues for the importance of distinguishing between fear as a response to physical threat, and panic as a response to the loss of the attachment object. While fear flees, panic, perhaps contrary to appearances, seeks security. This view of panic throws a new light on classic analyses of crowd behaviour, among them those of Le Bon, Tarde and Canetti, but it also has implications for how panic takes hold via electronic media, and for how outbreaks may be calmed. Finally, the essay argues that mediatised panic is a distraction from fear—in which anything at all may represent physical danger, but which at least offers a range of possible responses for addressing the problem, and offers the opportunity for the transformative work performed by cognition on affect. Here the paper draws on the script theory of Silvan Tomkins to provoke questions of the...
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A review of Kay Milton and Maruska Svasek (eds), Mixed Emotions: Anthropological Studies of Feeling (Berg, Osford and New York, 2005).
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In his post on Empyre, Michael Angelo Tata coined the term, eject. Alluding to Walter Benjamin's notion of an artifact generated from the technological innovation of mechanical reproducibility, Tata suggested that the e-ject... more
In his post on Empyre, Michael Angelo Tata coined the term, eject. Alluding to Walter Benjamin's notion of an artifact generated from the technological innovation of mechanical reproducibility, Tata suggested that the e-ject creates a culture industry by making ...
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RMIT Training Pty Ltd (ACN 006 067 349) of Kay House, Level 3, 449 Swanston Street, Melbourne, Victoria, trading as RMIT Publishing (the Publisher) grants you, the User, access to the text of the selected and purchased copyright works... more
RMIT Training Pty Ltd (ACN 006 067 349) of Kay House, Level 3, 449 Swanston Street, Melbourne, Victoria, trading as RMIT Publishing (the Publisher) grants you, the User, access to the text of the selected and purchased copyright works included in the INFORMIT PAY-...
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Working against the instantaneity of the hyperlink, new forms of feminist praxis work with movement and the unfolding of new networked and digital spaces which remake histories of women’s work. In this paper we introduce the concept of... more
Working against the instantaneity of the hyperlink, new forms of feminist praxis work with movement and the unfolding of new networked and digital spaces which remake histories of women’s work. In this paper we introduce the concept of feminist exscryption to characterise the kind of performativity which refuses the evaporation of sexual difference and which draws on the lived materiality of bodies and their insertion back into the network.
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Across the disciplines, from music therapy in medicine to Martha Nussbaum's (2001) study of the emotions as a form of ethical intelligence, interest in 'the emotions' is at a new high. In Cultural Studies,... more
Across the disciplines, from music therapy in medicine to Martha Nussbaum's (2001) study of the emotions as a form of ethical intelligence, interest in 'the emotions' is at a new high. In Cultural Studies, 'affect' seems to be emerging as a key term in the wake of expressed feminist ...
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If in the use of the term ‘fictocriticism’ the usually dispensed-with hyphen attempts to join the ‘ficto’ with the ‘critical’ it also inevitably severs them and holds them apart. Here the typographic device creates a complex conceptual... more
If in the use of the term ‘fictocriticism’ the usually dispensed-with hyphen attempts to join the ‘ficto’ with the ‘critical’ it also inevitably severs them and holds them apart. Here the typographic device creates a complex conceptual space and a space of potentiality, that is to say, a space for both thought and action. In this tense and quivering gap arises the possibility of a writing otherwise: a writing in which the confident authority of argument gives way to hesitation and doubt, and the house of fiction begins to fall apart, perhaps into a chasm. Here the plot is uncertain; place is displaced; setting becomes unstable; site gives way to constantly shifting situation. We are in the middle of something, immersed in the materiality of writing as doing and making, a thinking taking shape in action, and then shifting that shape again at the very moment it forms. It is in this process that we could say that ‘writing takes place’ .