Avoiding the Subject: Media, Culture and the Object
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What can Roger Rabbit tell us about the Second Gulf War? What can a woman married to the Berlin Wall tell us about posthumanism and inter-subjectivity? What can DJ Shadow tell us about the end of history? What can our local bus route tell us about the fortification of the West? What can Reality TV tell us about the crisis of contemporary community? And what can unauthorized pictures of Osama Bin Laden tell us about new methods of popular propaganda? These are only some of the thought-provoking questions raised in Avoiding the Subject, which highlights the feedback-loops between philosophy, technology, and politics in today's mediascape.
The influence of anxiety11Ch. 1The aesthetic object23A break in transmission : art, appropriation and accumulation25Ch. 2The love object37Relations with concrete others (or, how we learned to stop worrying and love the Berlin Wall)39Ch. 3The elusive object57"Look at the bunny" : the rabbit as virtual totem (or, what Roger can teach us about the second Gulf War)59Ch. 4The media(ted) object81From September 11 to the 7-11 : popular propaganda and the Internet's war on terrorism83Ch. 5The shared object93Abaondoned commonplaces : some belated thoughts on Big brother95Ch. 6The moveable object109Public transport : jaunting from the spaceship Nomad to the HSS Tampa111Ch. 7The foreign object129The floating life of fallen angels : unsettled communities and Hong Kong cinema131Ch. 8The abject object145Sovereignty, sacrifice and the sacred in contemporary Australian politics147A spanner in the works179
