Abstract

In what follows, I want to discuss three audience responses to ‘Kierkegaard: The Movie’, a paper I delivered at the Cultural Studies Association of Australia’s annual conference in December 2001, and to show where those responses led me. The reason I am doing so is that I am more and more convinced that our theories of ideology suffer a fundamental flaw. They fail to incorporate the richest source of data that we, as humanities academics, have at our disposal: the fact that we are all teachers. What richer source could we have for studying the transmission of ideas and beliefs than our own social practices? I am referring not only to the classroom, but also to our conferences, and even to our collegial visits to the pub. Wherever it is that university people garner new ideas and directions, that is where we will be most likely to learn about the mechanisms of cultural and indeed political transmission.