Location location : situating Bondi's "rubbish house"

Last year, the ABC’s Media Watch (17 Oct. 2005) noted the continuing outrage in the tabloid media over “the dirtiest house in NSW”. The program took issue with Sydney newspaper The Daily Telegraph, and the descriptor “exclusive” attached to their article on a property in beachside Bondi (9 Oct. 2005). In fact, as Media Watch pointed out, Channel Seven’s current affairs flagship Today Tonight had already made repeat visits to the residence. A Current Affair, Channel Nine’s rival show, as well as Bondi’s local newspaper also offered coverage. However, I am interested not in the number of times the story appeared – though this is certainly a symptom of what I do want to talk about. Instead, I want to consider the affect generated by this reportage. In turn, I want to consider what this reveals about our attitudes to refuse, and how these attitudes work to constitute social order in capitalist discourse

Iain Sinclair's excremental narratives

This consideration of British poet, novelist, and critic Iain Sinclair’s ‘bad’ writing begins at the summit of Beckton Alp, a pile of waste in London’s east that has been reconstituted as recreational space. For Sinclair, Beckton Alp functions as a totem signifying the pervasive regulatory influence of Panopticism in contemporary urban culture. It shares the Panopticon’s ‘see/being seen dyad’, which is delineated thus by Michel Foucault in Discipline and Punish

Doubling : capitalism and textual duplication

The critical reception to British writer Iain Sinclair’s most recent novel Dining on Stones (or, the Middle Ground) frequently focused on the British writer’s predilection for intertextual quotation and allusion, and more specifically, on his proclivity for integrating material from his own backlist. A survey of Dining on Stones reveals the following textual duplication: an entire short story, “View from My Window”, which was published in 2003; excerpts from a 2002 collection of poetry and prose, White Goods; material from his 1999 collaboration with artist Rachel Lichtenstein, Rodinsky’s Room; a paragraph lifted from Dark Lanthorns: Rodinsky’s A to Z, also from 1999; and scenes from 1971’s The Kodak Mantra Diaries. Moreover, the name of the narrator, Andrew Norton, is copied from an earlier Sinclair work, Slow Chocolate Autopsy. Of the six aforementioned inter-texts, only Rodinsky’s Room has had wide commercial release. The remainder are small press publications, often limited edition, difficult to find and read, which leads to the charge that Sinclair is relying on the inaccessibility of earlier texts to obscure his acts of autoplagiarism in the mass market Dining on Stones. Whatever Sinclair’s motives, his textual methodology locates a point of departure for an interrogation of textual doubling within the context of late era capitalism

Masterchef's amateur makeovers

The media industries are becoming increasingly reliant on amateur labour, and Australia's highest rating television program, MasterChef Australia, is no exception. The show's grand narrative of 'making over' home cooks into professionals is at odds with its calculatedly ambivalent representation and deployment of the trope of the amateur. This article proposes that MasterChef is instead invested in deferring the attainment of professional status so as to ensure the continued provision of inexpensive labour and content provided by amateurs

Photography, memory, metonymy or, W.G. Sebald’s Vertigo

The precarious and vertiginous quality of memory is a continuous thread running the extent of W.G. Sebald's writing. In Sebald's first novel Vertigo (1990), the attributes of memory are explored through its metonymic relation with photography. Broadly speaking, one of photography's functions is to metonymically represent memory. For Sebald, however, this metonymy is unreliable and unpredictable. The febrile, fragmented, and ultimately autonomous memories triggered by the metonym are the cause of the vertigo in the title. Sebald's vertiginous metonymy leads us to Roland Barthes' notion of the punctum. In his meditation on photography Camera lucida (2000) Barthes explicitly states that the photograph's punctum performs metonymically. 'However lightning-like it may be,' he writes, 'the punctum has, more or less potentially, a power of expansion. This power is often metonymic' (45). Barthes' theory provides an analytical framework for understanding Sebald's aetiology of vertigo and his narrative treatment of the metonymic encounter between memory and photography

The paradox of waste : Rio de Janeiro’s Praça XV flea market

At the end of each day, very little rubbish remains on the streets of Rio de Janeiro's affluent and middle-class suburbs. Through the night and early morning, phalanxes of sanitation workers and scavengers, working in both the informal and formal economies, sort and clean up much of it. Some of that rubbish is handpicked and reclassified as waste, and bound for secondary markets where it can be sold and bought anew (Coletta 2010). Informal and formal second-hand or 'flea' markets are a node within a globally ubiquitous network of secondary economies that generates valuable social, economic, and material infrastructure in cities (Evers and Seale 2014; UNHabitat 2010)

On the beach : informal street vendors and place in Copacabana and Ipanema, Rio de Janeiro

Copacabana and Ipanema, the reknowned beaches of Rio de Janeiro, form a visual metonymy with the city that carries symbolic and real currency within interconnected cultural, spatial, and material economies. These two beaches are pivotal in the construction, communication, and regulation of Rio's place-image (Shields, 1991) as a laid-back yet dynamic pleasure-ground for the expression and consumption of local carioca culture. The representation of Copacabana and its more upmarket neighbour Ipanema through social media, amateur and professional photography, film, and advertising is equally crucial to experiencing the place as any embodied encounter with the extraordinary, as well as prosaic, elements of the 'Copa-nema' conjection. This chapter explores how the presence of street markets and vendors, licensed and informal, contributes to or inhibits visual and embodied narratives of place, particularly those that present the beaches as sites of/for consumption. In doing so, it considers the discursive situating and treatment of informal street vendors along Copacabana and Ipanema beaches, and how this complex of informality, market, and place organizes or disorganizes discursive representation. This analysis is informed by fieldwork carried out in May and June 2013, along the orla (or waterfront precinct) at Copacabana and Ipanema, and in the suburbs proper that service the beach

Iain Sinclair's textual Obscenery

This consideration of Iain Sinclair’s work begins at the summit of Beckton Alp, a pile of waste in London’s east which has been reconstituted as recreational space. The Alp is a topographical curiosity, and its unconventional history has prompted serial visits in Sinclair’s fiction and non-fiction. Importantly, it also functions for Sinclair as a totem signifying the pervasive regulatory influence of Panopticism in contemporary urban culture

Playing in the margins : Iain Sinclair's poetics of refusal

In a 1991 essay entitled “Shamanism of Intent: A Retrospective Manifesto,” Iain Sinclair writes: “Any proposition asserted with enough force could ghost as the truth.” Sinclair’s aphorism, and the “manifesto” in which it appears, can be read as a response to the politics of Margaret Thatcher’s Britain, and, more specifically, as a retort to her free-market economic and social policies, characterised as they were by her definitive declaration: “there is no alternative.

Eye-swiping London : Iain Sinclair, photography and the flaneur

Taking shape like the spectral imprint of a developing photographic image, an apparition emerges from the streets of London to haunt Iain Sinclair's walks. It is the spectre of the flâneur. This spectral figure in Lights Out for the Territory and London Orbital, Sinclair's non-fictional accounts of London, signifies a spatio-temporal disruption.[1] In Sinclair's texts the flâneur, tracing Jacques Derrida's thought, is a paradox, a presence that is comprehensible only by acknowledging an absence.[2] This spatio-temporal illogic admits the possibility of a line of flight for the flâneur from his historical and cultural origins in 19th century Paris.[3] He metamorphoses, palimpsest-like, into contemporary incarnations -- ragpicker, stalker, photographer -- by adding and/or erasing layers, while retaining the ghostly residue of the original archetype.[4] Adaptation implies a teleology but the contemporary embodiment of the flâneur rejects a telos of evolution or enlightenment, in particular one produced through developments in technology. He reminds us of Walter Benjamin's angel who finds himself driven by the storm of progress 'irresistibly into the future, to which his back is turned.'[5] The flâneur's movement creates anachrony: he travels urban space, the space of modernity, but is forever looking to the past. He reverts to his memory of the city and rejects the self-enunciative authority of any technically reproduced image. The photographer's engagement with visual technology is similarly ambivalent. The photographer reiterates the trajectory of technological advance through his or her acculturation to new technologies, yet the authority of this trajectory is challenged by photography's product: the photograph, a material memory which is only understood by looking away from the future, by reading retrospectively