Sites of resistance
Abstract: To what extent are the enactments of resistive cultural identities a significant challenge to capitalist post-modernity? How is the representation and communication of protest incorporated into the capitalist project? What transcultural communication is mobilised in these moments? How does what is "Australian" get constructed in these debates? What are the implications for national and ethnic identity?
"We must embrace our collectivity. This requires a global perception of the capitalist relation as the constraint that it is, the development of a systemic sensitivity to its axiomatic, and shared strategies of resistance to it and its symbiotic despotisms, in a world-wide resonation of desires." — Brian Massumi (1992: 141)
S11 = M1 = J18 = S26. These codes have become a rallying point for resistance against what protesters term "corporate tyranny". Their slogans — "we live in a society, not an economy" — betray the growing dismay at capitalism's priorities. In the closed doors of corporations, decisions are being made which affect us all. What is at stake is not just the growing gap between poor and rich, the livelihoods and self-respect of the slave labour workforce mobilised by the requirements of consumer capitalism, but the meaning of self, community and nation.
In this project, I hope to analyse the cultural contexts of these protests, the contestation of meaning that occurs at these sites and to what extent the identities produced through this resistance is in fact a challenge to the hegemonic discourse of late capitalism.
There are a number of ways to access the information in this project. The framed version provides a list of all pages in the project in a frame on the left so you can check that you've seen everything there is to see (especially useful if you're my lecturer). If following the framed version, please click on the essay page called "meaning" first (otherwise the footnotes won't work properly). You can read the essay part from beginning to end, following the arrows, starting here (but without footnotes). Or you can go straight to the media collection and browse from there. Of course, I'm hoping to have enough links between the sections that you can also jump around and enjoy the hypermedia experience.
Except where copyrights are specifically held by other organisations, this whole thing is under copyleft. However, the moral rights of the author to be recognised as Rosanne Bersten have been asserted.