Issue No. 11 (2005) — Edges and Centres: Contemporary Experience and Lifestyle

In his book The Experience of Freedom, Jean-Luc Nancy describes experience as the site of a perilous freedom: "an experience is an attempt executed without reserve, given over to the peril of its own lack of foundation and security in this 'object' of which it is not the subject but instead the passion" (20). Experience is what a subject 'has' as a response to the forces of capital, technology, and the discursive practices that produce the body as an object in a field of forces that perpetually inform the subject's feeling and orientation to the world. Experience is both inside and outside the body, a perilous journey that both confirms and undermines the foundations of subjectivity.

The articles in this issue of Transformations examine contemporary experience as the effect of technologies of mediation and representation, as well as lifestyle exchanges that flow into and out of everyday life. There are edge experiences and centre experiences. Simply put, edge experiences dismantle centred subjectivity and the categories of subjectification that identify subjects in their subordination to discourse; centre experiences confirm the identity of subjects to discourse. Both edge and centre experiences involve the empowerment and disempowerment of subjects as living beings, and define limit potentials for life as it might be lived.

Agnes Bosanquet examines the experience of an "oceanic feeling" or sense of the sublime where one's sense of subjectivity is dissolved in certain extreme experiences such as underwater diving. Through a careful tracing of the "transcendental sensible" in the work of Luce Irigaray and other European philosophers and feminist theorists, Bosenquet establishes position from which to examine the oceanic experience as sexualised overflowing. Buck Rosenberg's article discusses modern forms of consumption and lifestyle through an analysis of IKEA furniture and the culture surrounding it. He proposes that IKEA belongs to an aesthetics of everyday life in which vast numbers of people participate, as opposed to an elite aesthetics of good taste. In particular he draws out the consequences of the DIY culture presently dominant in mainstream Western cultures, and how this changes the space of domesticity into a modern/postmodern consumer-based function. Through detailed ethnographic study, Terry Evans' article examines masculine penetration in sexual experience, especially in male to male relationships. Julie Dare's article looks at the issue of "cyberharrassment" on the internet. In particular, it examines the case of email stalking against an Australian academic that took place in the early 2000s, and draws out the legal implications of this. It suggests that there are extensive legal difficulties in policing this kind of behaviour because of the global nature of internet exchange. The article by Farida Tilbury, Yann Toussaint and Annette Davis looks at liminal spaces inhabited by the Hazara refugees from Afghanistan who have settled in rural Western Australia. Using the social theorist Victor Turner's key concept of liminality, the article examines art works created by the Hazara refugees as expressions of their liminality.

Issue Editors