Cirrus@Austlit

'Parody may be understood as the absorption of a revolutionary impulse into the everyday production of meaning as continuous variation and soft subversion. Considered in this way, parody is transformative because it operates on the components within a system of meaning and/or the context, logic or spatial perspective that grounds the possibility of meaning. It is the conditions under which shared meaning, sense and sensation depend that I aim to unpack in order to suggest the ways in which parody can alter a person’s relationship to the world. Approaching parody as a mode of lived abstraction and an embodied approach to affective self-organisation, body-environment co-construction and a challenge to identity, it becomes possible to move from formal concerns to a set of transformative practices. Thus parody indicates where the anchors of embodied, embedded, extended, enacted and affective are dug in and hold identity and the ground of meaning in a steady state. This article examines how parody moves from the impulse to overthrow and invert – ‘Beneath the street, The beach’ – to a collective impulse that moves the ground of meaning into a reconfigurative process that is allows totalised systems of meaning to collide and intersect. What is left is not the rubble and ruins of meaning but revitalised fragments, stems cells of meaning ready-tobe-remade. A lineage of parodic works will be paraded and discussed that directly address the tacit relation of ground, horizon, orientation and position. This parody parade will form the basis of a critique and the analysis of the ontological orientations that for example, opposing systems of perspective insert as the very ground of meaning. The implication leads to the assertion that all descriptions of the world, universe and the cosmos are parodies in search of an origin. ' (Publication abstract)

'The term ‘postmodernism’ persists in emanating a stain of disrepute, inscrutability and, in the context of this paper, odium particularly associated with its place within pedagogy in school and the University.' (Publication abstract)

'In his 1967 work, Presentation of Sacher-Masoch – Coldness and Cruelty (2007), Gilles Deleuze famously distinguishes the symptomatologies commonly designated by the names Masochism and Sadism, arguing that despite their shared feature of algolagnia, they are more rigorously approached as two very distinct regimes, having nothing to do with the ‘economy’ of the other. In the work’s preface, Deleuze also notes about Sacher-Masoch himself: ‘His whole oeuvre remains influenced by the problem of minorities, of nationalities and of revolutionary movements’ (2007: 9). Deleuze identifies that, within Masoch’s oeuvre, the masochist is he (normally a ‘he’) who insists on the contract. This insistence is neither to honour any particular contract or contracting per se, nor to safeguard himself within it, but to perform, through parodying it to its letter and pushing its operation towards its own limit, the inherent injustice that is its inexorable outcome. This article seeks to explore, using Masochistic ‘humouring’ or mockery of the contract as example, what might constitute a practice of intervention in regimes of power, and in which instances these iterations serve instead only as gestures of complicity with the injustices of the established logics. The article seeks to clarify, at the level of mechanism, a region of parody’s slippery operation, one which would determine the criteria for it to be intervention, as opposed to functioning as compliance and ‘bare repetition’ or ‘repetition of the Same’ (see Deleuze 2004: 27).' (Publication abstract)

'In a post-appropriative or remix culture, what is at stake in ‘borrowing’ from historical images that have at their core an outrage at an injustice being perpetrated on a people? What are the implications of such acts of borrowing for rethinking an ethics of appropriation? This essay draws on an analysis of the dynamics of the image to argue that the ‘effect’ or ‘empathic suffering’ that we may experience when viewing an appropriation do not merely arise from representation alone, but more significantly emerge through the forces and ghosts that lie beneath and structure representation. Through this approach it argues that the work of art may enable the ghosts to speak. In giving voice to these ghosts, the work may just do justice to the histories to which the work in indebted.' (Publication abstract)

'“EAT” is an excerpt from Horse, a work in progress, previously unpublished material, autobiographical reference, a personal diary of the fictive self. The text forms part of a PhD dissertation,’l format of polyvalence and polyphony enacts the engagement with psychoanalysis. The photographic images form a part of the theatre performance now in progress. The writing stages an interplay of prose/poetry and theory.' (Publication abstract)