After much fiddling about and procastinating the We Can Be Heroes paper has finally been sent back to the editors. One thing I didn’t learn in phd school was how long and drawn out these publication processes can be. This one has been going on for 12 months now of back and forth (and perhaps that’s a short one!) I am heartily sick of reading my writing but suspect this won’t be the last time. That’s okay – I am making it better in the refining of certain ideas and discussion, but I think there are only so many changes you make to any paper before you actually start making it worse. Let’s hope I’m not at that point yet. Here’s the abstract as it now stands for anyone who may be interested:

Televisual control: The resistance of the mockumentary
This paper argues that television articulates an operation of power that can be usefully conceptualised through the Deleuzian notion of control. Drawing on the writings of Gilles Deleuze and other French philosophers, the paper examines television’s cultural and technological force through the notion of control with specific reference to the television mockumentary. Through a discussion of the Australian mockumentary We Can Be Heroes (2005, Chris Lilley) the paper also outlines the capacity of television to offer opportunities of resistance to its operations of control. Beginning with Deleuze’s position on the role fo television (1995a, 1995b, 1995c), this paper proposes that televisual control holds the potential for a mode of “inhabited resistance”. Exploring the mockumentary television mode and its theorisation develops the concept of inhabited resistance to describe a complicit, pragmatic and creative formation of resistance. This type of resistance works from within the televisual operations of control. Generated from control and unable to escape it, the relation of control and inhabited resistance assists in describing the formation and practice of the television mockumentary as an idiosyncratic and specifically televisual form.