Avoiding the Subject Avoiding the Subject MEDIA, CULTURE AND THE OBJECT Justin Clemens | Dominic Pettman A U P Avoiding the Subject Avoiding the Subject Media, Culture and the Object Justin Clemens Dominic Pettman AMSTERDAM UNIVERSITY PRESS Cover illustration: Merritt Symes Cover design: Sabine Mannel, N.A.P., Amsterdam Lay-out: PROgrafici, Goes ISBN 90 5356 716 X NUR 736 © Amsterdam University Press, Amsterdam 2004 All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval sys- tem, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photo- copying, recording or otherwise) without the written permission of both the copy- right owner and the author of the book. Table of Contents 5 Acknowledgments / 7 Introduction / 9 The Influence of Anxiety / 11 Chapter 1: The Aesthetic Object / 23 A Break in Transmission: Art, Appropriation and Accumulation / 25 Chapter 2: The Love Object / 37 Relations with Concrete Others / 39 (or, How We Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Berlin Wall) Chapter 3: The Elusive Object / 57 “Look at the Bunny”: The Rabbit as Virtual Totem / 59 (or, What Roger Rabbit Can Teach Us About the Second Gulf War) Chapter 4: The Media(ted) Object / 81 From September 11 to the 7-11: Popular Propaganda and the Internet’s War on Terrorism / 83 Chapter 5: The Shared Object / 93 Abandoned Commonplaces: Some Belated Thoughts on Big Brother / 95 Chapter 6: The Moveable Object / 109 Public Transport: Jaunting from the Spaceship Nomad to the HSS Tampa / 111 Table op Contents 6 Chapter 7: The Foreign Object / 129 The Floating Life of Fallen Angels: Unsettled Communities and Hong Kong Cinema / 131 Chapter 8: The Abject Object / 145 Sovereignty, Sacrifice and the Sacred in Contemporary Australian Politics / 147 Conclusion / 177 A Spanner in the Works / 179 Notes / 185 Index / 212 Acknowledgments 7 Some of these chapters have appeared in different incarnations in different jour- nals and forums: “A Break in Transmission: Art, Appropriation and Accumulation,” first appeared in GENRE (a publication of the English Department, University of Oklahoma), vol. 34, no.3/4, Fall/Winter 2001, pp. 279-90. A much shorter version of “Relations with Concrete Others (or How We Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Berlin Wall)” is slated for the 21(5) issue of Theory, Culture and Society, October 2004. “From September 11 to the 7-11: Popular Propaganda and the Internet’s War on Terrorism,” was published online in a somewhat different form at both Largeur magazine (translated into French by P. Grosjean, December 2001), and Crikey mag- azine, Australia – where it endured the title “Jihad for Dummies.” “The Floating Life of Fallen Angels: Unsettled Communities and Hong Kong Cinema,” was first published in Postcolonial Studies, vol. 3, no.1, April 2000, pp. 69-80. An earlier version of “Abandoned Commonplaces: Some Belated Thoughts on Big Brother” was first published as a catalogue essay to Poly-Articulate, a collabora- tive exhibition by J. Clemens, C. Henschke, J. Meade, and A. Trevillian at WestSpace Gallery Melbourne, October 2002. An earlier version of “Sovereignty, Sacrifice and the Sacred in Contemporary Australian Politics” was presented at the Post Colonial Institute, University of Melbourne, May 25, 2000. Acknowledgments 8 We gratefully acknowledge the financial assistance provided by an Australian Research Council Grant for Justin Clemens, Russell Grigg and Henry Krips; by the School of Communication and Creative Arts at Deakin University; by the Department of English with Cultural Studies at the University of Melbourne; and by the Australian Academy of the Humanities. Dominic would like to thank “friends in deed” in vague spatio-temporal clusters. In Amsterdam, Thomas Elsaesser, Joost Bolten (and family), Wim Staat, Jan Simons, Catherine Lord, Richard Rogers and the AUP team. In Geneva, Rick Waswo, Michael Röösli, Pierrine Jan, Pierre Grosjean, Gabrielle Sigrist, and Charles Antoine- Courcoux. There is also an “un-” or “dis-”placed group who serve as constant compan- ions (actual and/or virtual) and regular sources of inspiration, including Wanda Strauven, Malte Hagener, Drehli Robnick, Gabu Heindl, Francesco Pitassio, Eddie Maloney, Kylie Matulick, Todd Mueller, Rob Crompton, Ned Rossiter, David Odell, and Steven Shaviro. People in or around the academy who have shown generous and unflinching support include Geert Lovink, McKenzie Wark, Toby Miller, Simon During, and Wlad Godzich. Notwithstanding the generosity of the aforementioned persons, journals, galleries and institutions, Justin would, above all, like to thank Rachel Hughes. If people still thought of texts as symbolic acts susceptible to varieties of human intervention, he would dedicate this book to her. He would also like to thank Geoff Boucher, Chris Feik, Oliver Feltham, Russell Grigg, Chris Henschke, Ann McCulloch, Henry Krips, John Meade, Michael Meehan, Peter Otto, Brian Stagoll and Andy Trevillian. Others, who have not been listed here for a variety of reasons, are no doubt grate- ful that they have escaped this shame-by-association. It does not mean, however, that we are any less grateful to them. Introduction The Influence of Anxiety Introduction: The Influence of Anxiety 11 We now know that future presents will bring other things than the present future can express, and when we speak of the future we express this dis- crepancy by dealing only with probabilities or improbabilities. NIKLAS LUHMANN1 1. I Object This is a book about objects. More precisely, it is about the fate of objects in the contemporary world. Such objects are extraordinarily peculiar, volatile cocktails of media, genres, things, forms, materials, fantasies and phantasms. This book tries to confront these objects with three sets of interrelated questions. First, what is the status of objects in a “virtual” world? How are they produced, distributed and con- sumed? How do they differ from previous “epochs of objectness”? Second, how is the status of affect transformed by these objects? What sorts of subjective invest- ments in objects are now possible or impossible? And how are these affects medi- ated and dispersed across communities? Third, what are the emergent possibilities for thought and action given these new relations between objects and affects – especially when considered under the intersecting signs of “art,” “politics” and “media”? We are, in other words, interested in the possibilities of tracking the mutations of contemporary objects and in discerning the political and aesthetic consequences of such mutations for and on human subjects. But we try to begin with the object. “Object” is a peculiar word, and what it purports to designate is no less pecu- liar. Deriving from the Latin obicere – to throw against, to expose, to present, to cast, to hold up as a defence – the modern English object, as both noun and verb, retains the traces of this etymology. An object can be a thing presented or a thing external to the mind, an oppositional statement, a charge or accusation, an aim or goal, something upon which one operates, a grammatical category, an obstacle, and so on. This polyvalency entails both a certain incoherence and the prolifera- tion of intransitive specializations. Philosophy, linguistics, theology, law, art, psy- choanalysis, mathematics and logic, science and modern administration constitute and treat their “objects” in specific ways, which have little or nothing to do with Introduction: The Influence of Anxiety 12 each other. Yet it is surely symptomatic that, in discourses as different as museum studies and fundamental ontology, there is today a widespread conviction that all traditional formulations and presentations of the object – no matter the special- ization – have fallen into disrepute.2 So the difficulties are multiplied by the times. Whether one calls it risk soci- ety, postmodernity, late capitalism, a new imperium, or globalization, we current- ly find ourselves in the uncanny position of living in the future itself. The exhaus- tion of this situation does not necessarily signify a lack of social, political, or cul- tural dynamism or energy. On the contrary, such exhaustion seems to entail rapid, radical, unpredictable transformations in every department of existence. As Thomas Pepper notes: “To feel exhausted is to know that one is alive.”3 Such exhaustion suggests that these transformations occur at a threshold-without- beyond, where we are at once witness to the dissolution of the grounds of all tra- ditional practices, yet incapable of progressing elsewhere. To advert to a sugges- tion of Giorgio Agamben’s, today all remains in force – but without significance.4 Our guiding questions – inspired by meditations on the relationships between objects, media and politics – entail a certain diversity of objects and approaches. Since we are attempting to prognosticate from the scattered entrails of media cul- ture, this very diversity can run the risk of appearing just as scattered. Our intro- duction briefly outlines some examples of the developments that necessitate a re- examination of the object. The line we follow is essentially that of post-Kantian, Romantic thought, which binds together aesthetics and politics according to con- ceptual axioms and methodologies which now seem to have reached their limit. It is at this limit that we attempt to position ourselves. Drawing on a now-familiar rogues’ gallery of thinkers, such as Giorgio Agamben,