The différance engine: videogames as deconstructive spacetime

The purpose here is to intervene within some dominant strands of videogame scholarship and propose a more problematic relation to our object. The two dominant tendencies taken-up here represent what has come to be self-styled as a media studies 2.0 model, over and against a supposedly previously dominant (and retroactivated as outmoded) 1.0. Proposed in opposition to these somewhat sweeping positions will be a deconstructive model which, while disagreeing with these theoretical ‘algorithms’, would not believe itself to be leading a charge toward any notionally more thoroughgoingly circumnavigating 3.0 account. Specifically, while the 2.0 account proposes a “new” active first-person Performative framework versus an “old” third-person indicative Constative, we would recommend a reworked iterative-Performative as propounded in the works of Derrida and Butler

Derrida and social networks: autoimmunity, ecanomie & general hospitality

Within the optic of the late Derridean concept of autoimmunity, this paper aims to uncover the postclassical economic logic of social networks in terms of what I call ecanomie (a portmanteau of economy+anomie). To take aim at these developing autoimmunal social networking protocols, I will take Derrida’s biopolitical metaphor (more properly metalepsis) seriously by drawing upon important related work within an emergent immunological disciplinary strand that questions the idea of an interior ‘host’ as opposed to an invasive ‘parasite’ (the once dominant Burnetian self/nonself physiological paradigm). Within contemporary social networks, where thanatopic errancies such as suicide are now more easily monetised, the once dominant immunal model of a host invaded by errant subcultural parasite, gives way to a more generalised errancy that one might see as generally autoimmune, even generally hospitable. Thus the once dominant protective or immunal world picturing classical broadcasting practices of a “host” culture begins to break up. In its place then comes a historically emergent age of the autoimmune excessive world picture. While then, as with the Aristotelian ‘body politic’ or ‘body proper’, errancy might always already have been a subterranean feature (an inhering ‘différancy’, as I would call it) within a social networking signification, this economic housing is displaced and thus also its connective etymological relation to oikos, heim and domicile. Hence ecanomie would be an immanent science of the unheimlich, wherein autoimmune energies are now successfully worked back into a body now seen as generally unwholesome or generally hospitable. This strange new ecanomic longtail Leviathan utilises errant energies in an autoimmune fashion where classically autoimmune practices (such as suicide itself) no longer threaten or befuddle the system but now recirculate as bio-thanato-political energies. Here an investigation of the connection between Derrida and recent immunological research will help to untie this new ecanomic logic of the social network

Ecanomie, signification, autoimmunity: social networks and the emergence of the excessive world picture

In this study aimed at uncovering the new economic logic of social networks, I concentrate on a substantial re-machining of Bataille’s notion of a sovereign ‘accursed share’ of general economy to add a theoretical dimension that I propose to term ‘ecanomie’ which suspends, I will argue, the traditional moral-numerical restrictions of a hitherto dominant ‘economic housing’. The lodging here of this portmanteau is coined to uneasily combine the previously separate concepts of ‘economy’ and ‘anomie’ into something that suspends the classical modeling of each. AswellasconvertingthesediscursivepositionsofBataille’stothebenefitofoutlining this recent historical turn I will also be utilising Heidegger’s regional take on signification [Bedeutung] to uncover the ‘concrete re-arrangements’ or re- configurations of embodied worldview that such ecanomic acts formally indicate or entail. Signification, it is argued, is not an abstract upper ‘layer’ or a mere outer ‘ontic shell’ of representation, but a corporeal networked substance that works-over all individual comportments. I will finally explore this substantively through the optic of Derrida’s deployment of biopolitical ‘autoimmunity’, here in the concrete re- signification of ‘the suicidal’ within social networking ecanomic technologies of the self

Immediation|toward the selfless other?

One should hear the calling of two hyperbolic selfs within this questioning concerning what I would propose to call here the desire for panop-tech-clair-voyance: Selfless interpreted as an infinite reactivity (machinery) Selfless interpreted as an infinite responsibility (agency

Embalmed|Unembalmed: the problems of the lived event within media studies 2.0

Media Studies 2.0 seeks to rewire the discipline of media studies from prevailing notions of aggregate third-person, top-down or imposed identities (as found within the domain of industrial mass communications media) toward what it sees as the communication of new bottom-up, first-person or singular reflexive identities favored within the post-fordist, post-industrial spaces of the internet, social networking sites, second life-like domains and computer game spaces. This article will point toward many of the hidden, though still important, intersections between these two supposedly separate conceptions through the use of a case study that throws notions of clean “communication” into question. From this it will go on to argue for a recognition of such new media spaces as better conceptualized through Batailleʼs notion of ʻGeneral Economyʼ and Derridaʼs notion of ʻUndecidabilityʼ, as dually taken forward in the work of Arkady Plotnitsky. The conclusion? Far from modern teletechnologies offering a new sense of micro-community or as channels of individual self-expression (a new Rousseauian or McLuhanesque global village of intimate contact), these emergent teletechnologies serve to further displace or undecide the locus of any signature context of communication, which this article takes as a cause for celebration

Big Fish in Small Ponds: The Trading Behaviour and Price Impact of Foreign Investors in Asian Emerging Equity Markets

This paper analyses data for the aggregate daily trading of all foreign investors in six Asian emerging equity markets and provides two new findings. First, foreigners’ flows into several markets show positive-feedback trading with respect to global, as well as domestic, equity returns. In particular, foreigners tend to be buyers in these markets on the day after rises in these markets or in US markets. The nature of this trading suggests it is due to behavioural factors or foreigners extracting information from recent returns, rather than portfolio-rebalancing effects. Second, the price impacts associated with foreigners’ trading are much larger than earlier estimates. The results suggest that foreign investors and external conditions have a larger effect on emerging markets than implied by previous work.equity markets; emerging markets; foreign investors; positive-feedback trading; price impacts

Modelling Inflation in Australia

This paper estimates a range of single-equation models of inflation for Australia. We find that traditional models, such as the expectations-augmented standard Phillips curve or mark-up models, outperform the more micro-founded New-Keynesian Phillips curve (NKPC) in explaining trimmed mean inflation, both in terms of in-sample fit and significance of coefficients. This in large part reflects the weak instruments problem in the estimation of the NKPC, and is partly corrected by including a direct measure of inflation expectations, but we still find that the unemployment rate or growth in marginal costs (unit labour cost and import prices) provides a better fit than either the output gap or level of real marginal costs. These traditional models also perform well in out-of-sample tests, relative to alternative models and some common benchmarks, with the standard Phillips curve clearly superior to these benchmarks on this test. As inflation has become better anchored and hence less variable, the magnitude of the errors of the single-equation models has declined, although the explanatory power (in terms of R-squared) has fallen together with this greater stability. We also investigate the empirical importance of some other variables that are commonly cited as determinants of inflation, and find little evidence that either commodity prices or the growth rate of money directly influence Australian underlying inflation.inflation; modelling

Trade Openness: An Australian Perspective

Australia’s external trade is relatively low compared with the size of its economy. Indeed, Australia’s openness ratio (exports plus imports as a proportion of GDP) in 2002 was the third-lowest among the 30 OECD countries. This paper seeks to understand Australia’s low openness by analysing the empirical determinants of aggregate country trade. We begin by estimating a standard gravity model of bilateral trade. Although the model appears to fit the bilateral data very well, it does a relatively poor job at fitting countries’ aggregate trade levels, with different methodologies sometimes providing highly conflicting results. The focus of the paper is an equation for country openness. Our equation explains a substantial amount of the variation in how much countries trade using a small number of explanatory variables. We find that the most important determinants of openness are population and a measure of distance to potential trade partners. Countries with larger populations trade less, as do countries that are relatively more remote. Furthermore, after controlling for trade policy there is little evidence of a positive correlation between openness and economic development. While gravity models suggest Australia trades much more than expected, the openness equation suggests that its level of trade is relatively close to what would be expected. The most important factors in explaining Australia’s low openness ratio are its distance to the rest of the world, and to a lesser extent its large geographic size.trade; outward orientation; economic geography; trade liberalisation

The Performance of Trimmed Mean Measures of Underlying Inflation

This paper uses data for Australia, the United States, Japan and the euro area to examine the relative performance of the headline CPI, exclusion-based ‘cores’, and trimmed means as measures of underlying inflation. Overall, we find that trimmed means tend to outperform headline and exclusion measures on a range of different criteria, indicating that they can be thought of as having better signal-to-noise ratios. We also find that there is a wide range of trims that perform well. One innovation for the United States is to break up the large implicit rent component in the US CPI into four regional components, which improves the performance of trimmed means, especially large trims such as the weighted median. The results lend support to the use of trimmed means as useful measures of underlying inflation at the current juncture where the growth of China and other emerging markets is having two offsetting effects on global inflation. Whereas some central banks have tended to focus on headline inflation and others have focused more on exclusion measures, our results provide some justification for a middle path, namely using trimmed mean measures which deal with outliers at both ends of the distribution of price changes in a symmetric manner.underlying inflation; core inflation; trimmed means; Australia; United States; Japan; euro area

Improving Median Housing Price Indexes through Stratification

There is a trade-off between how easy a housing price series is to construct and the extent to which it adjusts for changes in the mix of dwellings sold. Median house price measures are easily calculated, frequently used by industry bodies, and quoted in the media. However, such measures provide poor estimates of shortterm changes in prices because they reflect changes in the composition of transactions, as well as changes in demand and supply conditions. This study uses a database of 3.5 million transactions in the six largest Australian cities to demonstrate that compositional shifts between higher- and lower-priced parts of cities can account for much of the noise in median price measures. Accordingly, a simple method of adjusting for compositional change through stratification is proposed. The measure differs from those commonly used internationally, as neighborhoods or small geographic regions are grouped according to the long-term average price level of dwellings in those regions. The measure of price growth produced improves substantially upon a median and is very highly correlated with regression-based measures.