Scott Sharpe

Place ‘From One Glance’: the use of place in the marketing of New Zealand and Australian wines

Abstract Associations between place and wine are historically deep. Past and current narratives of wine production are wedded to environment attributes of particular places, and in both the European and Australasian settings this has been codified by way of formal labelling requirements for the place of origin for wines. In this paper we explore the role of place references on the front labels of Australian and New Zealand wines through a small initial survey. The results reveal that the importance of place references is stronger for New Zealand wines. We argue that this reflects strongly the very different structures of the industries in the two countries, with the emphasis for New Zealand producers on high-quality wines for which origin statements are expected as opposed to the Australian focus on the production of bulk, value-driven wines dependent on the blending of wines across regions and places. This in turn has implications for the future development and marketing trajectories of the two industries.

Escaping Monstropolis: child-friendly cities, peak oil and Monsters, Inc.

In Monstropolis, the virtual world of monsters in the 2001 Pixar-animated Disney movie Monsters, Inc., the screams of human children are the source of energy. In this paper, the energy shortage (or ‘scream shortage’) depicted in Monsters, Inc. serves as a subtle and engaging allegory, drawing attention to the non-virtual worlds concerns with energy supplies, particularly oil. Peak oil, the time at which the global production of oil reaches its maximum, is arguably one of the most important issues that will affect the conceptualisation of children and our ability to create and maintain child-friendly cities. This paper derives new ways of conceptualising the relationship between peak oil and children in modern western societies, through a critical analysis of a number of themes from Monsters, Inc. The value of such an analysis is that in Monsters, Inc. the issues of children, lifestyle and energy acquisition and use are all brought together in a common problematic. Thus, the underlying descriptions in Monsters, Inc. provide a catalyst for a wider debate about children and peak oil.

Unveiling seductions beyond societies of control: affect, security, and humour in spaces of aeromobility

Taking the bare bodies that starred in the recent Air New Zealand in-flight safety demonstration and advertising campaign as its starting point, this paper stages an encounter between bareness and security in order to think about how affective atmospheres might be engineered and manipulated within spaces of aeromobility. From a representational perspective the bare bodies appeal to a particular economy of truth through the unveiling of the corporation, parodying the bareness that is a central technique associated with airport securitisation. But the bareness in the in-flight safety demonstration generates a different kind of intimacy between the corporation and the passenger that facilitates the emergence of affective atmospheres which hinge around fun and lightness. In light of theorisations that invoke the corporation as a model of the control society we finish by drawing out some of the tensions that hinge around figures of veiling and unveiling to demonstrate how affect necessarily exceeds its capture and engineering.

The hope for oil crisis: children, oil vulnerability and (in)dependent mobility

Abstract Oil vulnerability is likely to impact upon one group of citizens – children – in critical ways, since children have borne a special brunt of a car-dependent culture. Childrens freedom to explore the city has been curtailed, in large part because of the perceived risks of traffic and ‘stranger danger’. Children are over-represented in road fatalities involving cars and pedestrians and cyclists. Children are also subject to chronic conditions associated with inactivity such as obesity. In order to address this situation, advocates of child-friendly cities have suggested measures to increase childrens independent mobility (CIM) and encourage childrens active transport. In this paper, we argue that there is a conflation of CIM and childrens active transport, which perpetuates the separation of children from adults. To take both childrens rights and desires seriously, as well as to take into account the concerns of parents, the active transport needs of both groups must be addressed simultaneously. One cost effective and immediately available strategy is to reduce car speeds in order to minimise the damage to all users of active transport. A holistic understanding of urban transport and children shows that reducing speeds produces the co-benefits of increased health and reduced reliance on oil.

Laughing with the Yes Men: the Politics of Affirmation

It is symptomatic of a culture addicted to novelty that culture jamming has already been subject to pronouncements of its redundancy as a political strategy. For academic and artist Steve Mann, for example, the political and counter-cultural strategies of culture jammers have had their day. In a somewhat Baudrillardian analysis, Mann (2003) argues that culture and counter-culture are barely distinguishable in an allpervasive, global culture too ready to incorporate the anti-gesture. Culture jamming, according to Mann, then, is rapidly losing political force and the capacity to generate new cultural images and values. The idea of the novelty of culture jamming might be rescued from the status of oxymoron if the specifically political character of culture jamming is reassessed. Yet it is not primarily a defence of ‘culture jamming’, understood as a category of action, which is pursued here. Rather, the paper seeks to demonstrate how the singularity of a particular event enacted under the trope of culture jamming forces us to reconsider the very meaning of political action. Taking a specific culture jamming event as an instance of something singular having taken place, we point to the capacity for novelty and initiation that is deserving of the name of politics. And we suggest that the event enables us to think something new—as opposed to merely fashionable—precisely because it is irreducible to a counteror antigesture. As Christine Harold (2004, p. 194) suggests, the force of the media prankster’s comedy lies in the fact that it rises above the ascetic moment of critique

Yea-Saying Laughter

Today, it seems, everyone is a comedian. While wit has long had a place in the politician’s arsenal, would-be leaders are now pushed to new lengths to show that they can pass the comic test, as the most recent US elections demonstrated well. From Tina Fey’s highly publicized caricatures of Sarah Palin or Letterman’s relentless jibes at JohnMcCain, to the candidates’ own attempts at carefully tailored self-mockery – all the evidence indicated a close relationship between persuasive power and laughter. Yet, the demand for comedians extends well beyond the political arena. Teachers are increasingly urged by educationalists to enliven their delivery with jocularity. Social protestors train newcomers in the use of humour for non-violent resistance. Teams of doctors dressed as clowns deliver an optimal dose of laughter in children’s wards. Psychologists advise organisations on how to use humour to enhance workplace wellness, while negotiating the thorny issue of ‘political correctness’. When work pursuits are over, laughter clubs offer a means of relieving stress, and personal column editors supply acronyms to assist in the search for a mate with a G(ood) S(ense) O(f) H(umour). It is little wonder that humour is becoming an increasingly important theme in scholarship, as not only humorologists but analysts of social life more generally seek to understand the peculiar and transformative powers of laughter.

Black-faced, red faces: the potentials of humour for anti-racist action

ABSTRACT Among incidences of everyday racism, offensive jokes are writ large as a way of establishing and maintaining social norms and policing the boundaries of the social body. Yet humours possible deployment toward anti-racist ends constitutes an under-researched problem. This paper examines an incident of supposedly humorous blackface performance on an Australian family variety television show. The incident was notable as an occasion where humour was used with racist effects but also to anti-racist ends. Literature on anti-racist action commonly assumes that responses to racism should have the gravity commensurate to the problem. We argue that humour enables actors to take a ‘decommitted’ relationship to their actions, creating the perception of distance between themselves and the action. While this capacity to decommit enables racist actions to masquerade as ‘just a joke’, it may also form the basis of a less confrontational, but potentially powerful, form of anti-racist action.

The Minute Interventions of Stewart Lee: The affirmative conditions of possibility in comedy, repetition and affect

The popular performer speaks in an already recognizable tongue, producing pleasure by an affirmation of what the audience already knows and feels. Yet affirmation is, at its best, much more than this, involving an openness into the coming into being of something that is genuinely new. In this article we explore the way that humour – and specifically the stand-up comedy of Stewart Lee – can cultivate an audiences bodily receptivity to novel modes of thinking and being which are never recognisable in any immediate sense. Affirmation, if it is to be more than a mere confirmation of what is already given, necessarily eschews reactivity. Certainly, Lees comedy operates through a form of critique that goes beyond the negativity that we would associate with conventional modes of critical thinking and practice. Most obvious in Lees lampooning of the popularity of the representationally-laden form of observational comedy, ‘critique’ here works affectively at least as much as it does cognitively. Through his attention to the form rather than the content of humour, and through his use of repetition and the creation and maintenance of tension, Lee provides a slow motion capture of those habitual modes of anticipation that foreclose other possibilities for thought and action. In examining the comedic and performative affects of Lees comedy, we give a sense of the conditions in and through which new modes of attention, new dispositions and forms of bodily attunement might be produced. Drawing on more recent affect theory focused on the minute perceptions of the body, we argue that wit has a special relation to the new, less because it effects an irruptive change in the existing state of affairs, than because it exposes us to the affective conditions of possibility for the production of novelty.

AFFECT: an unworkable concept

Abstract Somewhere between use and mere whim there is a place for the expressivity of affect as a concept. This paper raises the question of how the concept of affect might be mobilized without reducing its expressions to the logic of work. We suggest that the very attempt to put affect to work in order to solve pressing problems may be symptomatic of an anxiety to master the events of the world. With this in mind, we make a case for the importance of Georges Batailles critique of an instrumentalist form of thinking, which reduces events to objects of human sensemaking. Batailles “general economy” opens onto all that the restricted economy of use negates; namely, that which exceeds our efforts as humans to make sense of, and thus appropriate, events. Ultimately, Batailles antihumanist thought limits the potential of the gift economy, by rendering it the negative of the social order. We argue that a more posthumanist thought can realize the immanent potential of affect and apprehend its gift to thinking.Somewhere between use and mere whim there is a place for the expressivity of affect as a concept. This paper raises the question of how the concept of affect might be mobilized without reducing its expressions to the logic of work. We suggest that the very attempt to put affect to work in order to solve pressing problems may be symptomatic of an anxiety to master the events of the world. With this in mind, we make a case for the importance of Georges Batailles critique of an instrumentalist form of thinking, which reduces events to objects of human sensemaking. Batailles “general economy” opens onto all that the restricted economy of use negates; namely, that which exceeds our efforts as humans to make sense of, and thus appropriate, events. Ultimately, Batailles antihumanist thought limits the potential of the gift economy, by rendering it the negative of the social order. We argue that a more posthumanist thought can realize the immanent potential of affect and apprehend its gift to thinking.

The Contemporary and Eccentric Position of "The Winnebago Man"

In a dated and grainy YouTube clip a tall, middle-aged American swears frustratedly and profusely into the camera as he takes and retakes several scenes of an industrial film intended to sell the latest Winnebago mobile home unit. The performance is more or less downhill from his opening line on: ‘The Winnebago Concepts and Engineering Department have developed a multi-functional bathroom, privacy . . . ah, I don’t know what the fuck I’m reading!’ The videos had been produced in 1989 and an outtake VHS video of his outbursts was passed from enthusiast to enthusiast until 2005. In that year, the year that YouTube was launched, the rantingWinnebagoMan, otherwise known as ‘the angriest man in the world’, suddenly became a phenomenon. Going viral, the swearing, ranting Jack Rebney achieved a sort of cult notoriety. In 2010 the documentary,Winnebago Man, depicting the life of this recreational vehicle salesman, was released. Directed by Ben Steinbauer and starring Jack Rebney, the documentary is a classic allegorical tale. Plucked from obscurity by a twist of (ill-)fate, Rebney has retreated from the world to a forest hide-away. Then, after a long search by a devotee, he is persuaded to descend back into society, where he receives some redemption. A response to the viral video of ‘The Angriest Man in the World’, the documentary follows the tracking down and outing of Rebney from his hermitage in the mountains of Northern California, chronicling his cult celebrity status in San Francisco and beyond.