Clemens Justin, Pettman Dominic. Avoiding the Subject: Media, Culture and the Object

Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2014. — 216 p. — ISBN-10: 905356716X; ISBN-13: 978-9053567166.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 this lively and erudite collection of inter-related essays on the postmillennial mediascape. Students and teachers of visual culture, critical theory, cultural studies, film theory, and new media, will find a wealth of ideas and insights in this fresh approach to the electronic environment. Avoiding the Subject argues for a new sensitivity and empathy towards objects (including, and especially, human objects - such as refugees, enemy combatants,collateral damage, etc.). Whether the focus be on the specifically postcolonial trauma of Australian detention centers, or the viral mutations of propaganda in the age of the internet, each chapter attempts to avoid the subject in order to escape the egocentric confines of our own subjective perspectives.The Influence of AnxietyThe Aesthetic ObjectA Break in Transmission: Art, Appropriation and AccumulationThe Love ObjectRelations with Concrete Others (or, How We Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Berlin Wall)The Elusive Object“Look at the Bunny”: The Rabbit as Virtual Totem (or, What Roger Rabbit Can Teach Us About the Second Gulf War)The Media(ted) ObjectFrom September 11 to the 7-11: Popular Propaganda and the Internet’s War on TerrorismThe Shared ObjectAbandoned Commonplaces: Some Belated Thoughts on Big BrotherThe Moveable ObjectPublic Transport: Jaunting from the Spaceship Nomad to the HSS TampaThe Foreign ObjectThe Floating Life of Fallen Angels: Unsettled Communities and Hong Kong CinemaThe Abject ObjectSovereignty, Sacrifice and the Sacred in Contemporary Australian PoliticsA Spanner in the Works