[csaa-forum] Media Seminar @ UNSW

[James Donald]

UNSW Media Film and Theatre Seminars
Wednesday 19 April 2006
5 p.m. Webster Building 327

Mapping Media Ecologies
Uneven Development and the Critical Chiasmus

The concept of a 'media ecology' has had 
intermittent success since the heyday of Marshall 
McLuhan's peak of theoretical productivity; at 
its worst lapsing into puerile positivism and 
celebration, while at its best finding it 
difficult to position itself effectively 
vis-à-vis other, sexier media concepts. In this 
paper, Murphet sketches a dynamic model of 
Darwinian and Freudian energetics in a 
competitive media environment. Drawing on the 
work of Luhmann, Kittler, Jameson and Hansen, the 
argument ultimately finds a critical destination 
in Benjamin's Freud as a basis for understanding 
the struggle for survival between media, and the 
chiasmic relation between the most 'advanced' and 
most 'archaic' strata of a given media ecology.

Julian Murphet is Senior Lecturer in the 
Department of English at Sydney University, 
author of Literature and Race in Los Angeles 
(2001), Brett Easton Ellis' American Psycho: A 
Reader's Guide (2002), co-author of Narrative and 
Media (2005), co-editor of Literature and Visual 
Technologies: Writing After Cinema (2003), and 
author of various articles and chapters on 
postmodernism, theory, race and film.

-- 
Dr James Donald
Associate Dean (Education), Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences
Professor of Film Studies, School of Media, Film and Theatre
University of New South Wales
Sydney
NSW 2052
Australia

Telephone	(02)9385 4858
Mobile		0433 126445
Facsimile		(02)9662 2335

International
Telephone	+612 9385 4858
Mobile		+61433 126445
Facsimile		+612 9662 2335

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